Guards and Monsters

Chapters

Those who are Called
To Be a Bat
Death and Consequences
The First Mission
Grading our Performance
Another Kind of Duty
Talk of the Town
Bar Hopping
Bug Hunt
In the End…
Meeting the Princess
Down in the Depths
A Few Weeks Later

Those who are Called

La lalala la, quite unexpectedly,
La lalala la, almost imperceptibly,
Lala la lala, sloooowly and quietly,
I’ve got you… under… my spell.
You didn’t. Even. Notice. When you fell.
You friends and family probably can’t really tell…
Now jump!

And then Bonnie kind of just stared at me for a while, her eyes narrowing, and I smiled nervously and my hoof twitched, wanting to step back out of range, but she just rolled her eyes. “Is that the new magic Twilight’s been teaching you?”

“I’ll get it sooner or later!” I said, the tension washing out of my body and leaving the same huge grin, only much less nervous. “Although she actually wanted my help coming up with a musical counterspell, since apparently she really needed one on one of her old adventures and didn’t know enough musical theory. Her band managed to wing it, but when she thinks back on it, it’s still an embarrassing failure on her part. And you know Twilight – any failure is just an opportunity to bury her nose in another book.” I paused. “Not that I’m a book.” I paused again. “Or that she buried her nose in me. She’s not really my type. She’s too…” I waved a hoof in circles.

“Crazy?” Bon Bon offered.

“No, no, I like crazy,” I said. “And I like magic, and danger, and purple! Purple is good. Maybe I should sleep with her.”

Bonnie snorted at the notion. “I really can’t imagine her sleeping with anypony.”

“Oh, right! That’s why she’s not my type.” We sort of stared at each other for a bit, and then I giggled, picturing Twilight trying to have sex. Maybe if she got laid on her back, she could glue the checklist to the ceiling…

“So how did a counterspell lead to you trying to hypnotize me?” Bon Bon asked, turning back to the dishes.

“Well, I needed to have some samples of siren magic to counter. And on the way home, I got to thinking that since my special talent is musical, I might be able to adapt them to unicorn magic. I’ll get it sooner or later!”

“Dishes,” Bon Bon said, out of nowhere. I made a curious noise, and she continued in monotone. “Dishes. Dishes. Dishesdishesdishesdishes do. The dishes. Do. The dishes. Do do do do—“

I couldn’t help but jump in, with something a little more melodic. “Dodeedo, dodeedo, do them do them do them do them –“

“NOW!” Bon Bon shrieked, in a voice like the love child of a griffon screech and Princess Luna’s Royal Canterlot Voice.

“Oh right! I said I was going to help!” I pranced across the kitchen and made the water from the faucet swirl around in midair to rinse off the dishes Bonnie was washing. “Wow, your spell worked a lot better than mine.”

===

In my dream, I was a siren. The ocean was made of music, and my voice filled it with light and motion. And harmony – my sisters swam by my side, complementing my singing by completing the chords.

A dark rumble of white noise approached, and without having to say anything, the three of us swam to the surface and let our joyous terror fill the open air. One by one, the sailors on the ship that had disturbed our play leaned farther and farther over the edge, until they fell into the water… and then we fell upon them, and while our mouths were full of pony flesh, the song continued, carried by their delightful, burbling screams.

“Charming,” came a sarcastic voice, cutting through the music and knocking me out of my reverie. Suddenly, I was a pony again, still elbow-deep in the guts of some poor sap, his organs twitching around me, the sticky warmth contrasted against the chill of the ocean.

“Um… hi. Princess,” I said, grinning nervously. “What brings you here?” I shook my foreleg until the dying sailor drifted free, the other two sirens whirling on him and digging in with claws and teeth. I swam for the surface, then floated up onto the now empty deck of the ship, since I didn’t really want to be in the water with a pair of vicious sirens.

Not while Luna was here, anyway. Maybe after she left, I’d let them eat me. I mean, no sense wasting a dream, right?

Luna was suddenly standing next to me on the deck, the moonlight shining down from behind her, leaving her in silhouette. “A few weeks ago, I received a disturbing memory orb."

I cringed back, trying to hide myself under the table, but I was hoofcuffed to the chair, the spotlight shining in my face blinding me. “It didn’t really happen! I’m innocent! I haven’t killed anypony!”

“I figured as much, seeing as the memory ended with your death.” Luna reached out and turned the spotlight so that it pointed down at the table, then tossed it back up into the sky. Her horn glowed, and she poured me a cup of tea.

I reached down with shaking hooves and gripped it, not trusting myself to do magic. The grass was soft under my flank, and the dim glow of the moonflowers that dotted the meadow mirrored the shining stars overhead. I took a sip of the tea, and let the warmth calm me.

Ew. Mint.

“So am I in trouble?” I asked, quietly.

“Not yet,” Luna replied, her voice stern. “You have yet to commit an evil act, and dreaming of such is not a crime in itself. But I worry, Miss Heartstrings.”

“Well…” my head swum as I tried to decide how to respond to that. My kneejerk reaction was to get angry, and protest that I was perfectly in control and that the very notion that I would ever let my sick little fantasies run away with me was laughable! But, you know. Even I wasn’t buying that one. “I don’t want to be banished from Equestria,” I said. “I like it here.”

Luna laughed. “That isn’t what I had in mind.”

“It might be for the best if I was, though,” I said. “If I was kept in the Everfree Forest, no one would care that I’m a monster.”

“There are other openings available, for those some would call monsters,” the princess replied. This was not exactly the reassurance I’d been fishing for. “I seek to rebuild my entourage from times of old. If you are interested in hearing more, seek me out in the waking world.”

I cringed. “That sounds like a recipe for a really horribly embarrassing scene at the castle if this is just a dream.”

“Then consider it a test,” Luna replied, taking to the air with powerful downstrokes of her gigantic feathery wings. “How much are you willing to risk, for the chance to find a place where your oddities are appreciated, and not merely tolerated by those you call friends?”

As she vanished into the moon, I considered her invitation. The price of a ticket to Canterlot Castle wouldn’t break me. The embarrassment of acting stupid in front of the Canterlot Elite… actually, that kind of sounded fun.

The quality of the darkness changed, and I realized that I was awake. More or less. I rolled over and nibbled on Bon Bon’s ear until she grunted. “Hey Bonnie… how would you like to go to Canterlot and act really silly in front of Celestia and everypony?”

“Go back to sleep, Lyra,” she grumbled.

===

“So, Bon Bon, how would you like to go to Canterlot and act really silly in front of Celestia and everypony?” I asked her again, in the morning, while I was cooking up some eggs and hay. I don’t normally cook breakfast, but that morning I just sort of had the urge, and we had the eggs, and they didn’t smell any different from normal eggs or radiate magic or anything, so I figured they were actual eating eggs that I could cook and not one of Bon Bon’s weird experiments.

Bonnie looked up from the chocolates she was painstakingly embedding with little colorful candy dots. With her hooves. I don’t know how she does that; I can’t even do it as well as she does using magic. “Explain,” she said, giving me a look. The patient look. It’s one of the safe ones.

So I did, telling her all about the dream and Luna, sort of like I just did here except that I think I went into a bit more detail on the sirens-feeding-on-sailors part until she told me to skip ahead. “So do you want to come? Being silly is always more fun with friends.”

Bon Bon sighed. “I guess I don’t have a choice. You’re going to need an adult.”

“I am an adult!” I said, poking at the eggs with a spatula to try to flip them over. Some of the hay had gotten in them and sort of seared to the frying pan, which was making it difficult. Butter! I’d forgotten the butter.

“You’re too excited about this,” she said. “No matter what sort of job Luna offers you, you’re going to say ‘yes’.”

“Well, yeah! It’s Luna! Princess Luna! And she’s doing something special just for me and an unknown number of other ponies but the point is that she actually came into my dream and gave a personal invitation. Of course I’m going to say yes!”

“Even if she wants to turn you into a statue to decorate her bedroom?”

“If that is what she wants, then I’m sure it’s not nearly as unpleasant as you’d think being a statue would be given the sort of default assumptions ponies tend to make about petrification,” I answered, considering the scenario. “For example, I might be an animated statue, like a gargoyle. Or I might get weekends off!”

“Weekends off,” Bon Bon repeated. “From being a gargoyle.”

“Eep!” It was around that point that the eggs caught fire. It’s a good thing we have running water, and I have magic, or I might have tried something silly like smothering the fire with the big bottle of oil sitting next to the stove. But we do, and I do, so I used the sink instead.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” Bon Bon said, watching as I ran around putting out fires, since some of the hay hadn’t wanted to stay in the pan. “You did let Princess Twilight sacrifice you.”

“Only the once!” I protested, holding the waterlogged frying pan over the sink and trying to squeeze enough of the water out of the egg/hay mixture to salvage it. “And it was a ritual sacrifice.”

Bon Bon sounded a little confused. “Aren’t they all?”

“I hope so!” I said. “Actual pony sacrifices where the pony really dies would be kind of…” I tried to find a word other than ‘sexy’ and all I could come up was “bad. But this was different. Twilight led me into her library…”

”So what kind of ritual are you doing, Twilight? It’s not one where I actually die, is it?”

Twilight scrunched up her adorable little muzzle. “You’ll be alive at the end of it. And it shouldn’t hurt.”

She took me down to her basement, where she had an elaborate ritual circle set up on what looked like a tiny end table or something? Maybe a bar stool? With all the candles and the tiny miniature altar it was hard to tell for sure. She explained about how Celestia had a spell to keep ponies from dying from accidents, but it left a sort of temporal distortion on their aura, so she had to do a ritual to cleanse them. And I was one of them, since I’d been saved from certain death after Cadance tricked me into jumping off a cliff while I was brainwashed by the changelings.

“So to fix it, I have to kill you,” she said, with a sweet little smile, which was adorable, but it kind of ruined the effect when she shouted, “Spike! Is it ready?”

“Coming Twilight!” he called back, then trotted down the stairs holding a little pony-shaped sugar cookie, with frosting matching my mane and coat and a sketchy little icing version of my cutie mark.

Twilight snatched it out of his claws with her magic. “I declare that held in my grasp is the pony Lyra Heartstrings. Does anypony object?”

“That’s Lyra all right,” Spike said, looking it over.

“Yep! That’s me,” I said, going along with it.

“Let it be known that nopony has denied that Lyra Heartstrings now lies upon the altar,” she said, setting the cookie down amidst all the candles. “Spike, please perform the sacrifice.”

Spike looked a bit hesitant. “It’s not going to start moving and screaming, is it?”

“No, no,” Twilight said. “Lyra was here and agreed that it was her, so I don’t need to go quite that far with the similarity aspect this time.”

“Because that was really creepy,” Spike said, taking the cookie carefully in his claws.

“Just eat the sacrifice!” she snapped. But unlike certain Earth Ponies I live with, she cooled down right away. “And act like you enjoy it. You’re a vicious dragon devouring a young maiden, you should be savoring it.”

“Raar,” Spike said, floating the cookie around in the air, then leaned forwards and bit off the horn.

“Noooo, my magic!” I whimpered. “Why can’t I move my legs?”

“Because I’m going to eat them next, mua ha ha ha.” And he did. Well, one of them. Then he accidentally broke the cookie in half going for one of the back legs. “And, um, I’m tearing you in half. Guts are flying everywhere.”

I giggled a bit as he ate the tail, then gasped as he bit down on the back half of the body. “Oooh, Spike, yes! Lick my cutie mark!”

“Um…”

“Nooo, don’t stop, I want to feel your tongue on my hindquarters!”

“You can’t feel anything,” Twilight said. “Numbing spell. That’s why you’re not screaming in agony.”

“A filly can pretend, can’t she?” I asked, grinning.

Spike glowered at me, and bit off the cookie’s head.

“…and then Spike and I made out in the stairwell, while Twilight double-checked her instruments to make sure that the interference was really gone,” I finished.

Bon Bon was quiet for a few seconds. “Huh.”

“Really though, if you want to come along I’d love to have you along. I mean, I invited you and everything.” I looked down at the gray soggy mess in the pan, and took a quick sniff. Then a bite. “Huh. Still tastes good.”

“And if I say ‘no’, you’ll listen?”

“Probably not!” I said, shrugging. “But maybe you and Luna can get in a big fight and get us both kicked out of Canterlot or something?”

Bonnie snorted. “I always did want to buck an Alicorn.”

===

Because Bon Bon was there, I walked sedately through Ponyville’s streets. It was mostly psychosomatic, but I could feel her eyes on me, her disapproving glare intensifying every time my hooves threatened to leave the ground all at the same time. I’ve heard ponies say that she’s good for me, because she keeps me grounded, and there are so many meanings of the word that fit.

But it wasn’t oppressive – I wasn’t keeping outwardly calm out of fear or anything. Not even the fear of disappointing her. It was just… a pressure. A pleasant pressure holding me down, and I made my way down the street like a ferret slinking through a rabbit hole. With her by my side, nopony could tell that I was completely insane. I mean, everypony knew, because it was Ponyville and I’d managed to build up my reputation, but if you were new in town, I could have been anypony, blending into the background just like everypony else.

The door to the palace was unlocked, and Twilight Sparkle still hadn’t managed to hire any guards, so we just walked in like we belonged there, and headed to the library. It’s not nice to say, but Twilight really needs to get out more – 90% of the time she’s either in the library or in the basement laboratory. She has her throne room where she and her friends hold court, but if you actually want her help with something you should ignore her posted hours and just go bother her in her lair. If you don’t find her, you’ll at least find Spike.

That day, we at least found Spike. He was sprawled out on the couch reading comics. “Aren’t you getting a little old for those?” I asked.

“No way!” Spike said, looking up and waving to the two of us with a genuine smile. That’s one of the things I like about him – he’s always happy to see me, even if I give him a hard time with the flirting and all. “This is an adult comic.”

My ears perked up at that, and I leaned forwards to get a look. Spike closed it right away, but from the glance I got it was about what I’d expected – they’d doubled down on the cheese and put all the mares in suggestive poses.

“What do you want, Lyra?” Spike asked. He was trying to sound patient and helpful but I could see his eyes keep flicking back at the comic book.

My standard answer to this would be either ‘a long conversation about magical theory’ or ‘a back rub’, neither of which would let him get back to his comic. Fortunately for him, the answer this time was, “Do you know where Twilight is?”

“Er… she’s not really available right now,” he said. “She came down with the magic flu.”

“Oh wow. Alicorns can catch it? Do they have a cure yet?”

“I don’t think anypony’s really looking,” Spike said. “It doesn’t seem very contagious, and nopony’s gotten really sick from it…”

“Yeah, but how many ponies is Twilight going to kill after she goes insane from not being able to use magic?” I asked, cringing a bit.

Spike snorted. “I’ll make sure you’re first in line.”

I had to laugh at that. “Thanks!”

“So what did you need her for?” Spike asked.

“Luna invited me to join her entourage, but as part of the test I have to go to Canterlot and find her. I thought Twilight might know how to do that, since she’s a princess too.”

“Hmm,” Spike said. He set the comic down, and headed over to the shelves. I followed after a few second, when it was obvious he didn’t know exactly where to look.

Eventually, he found a big book with a picture of the Palace on the front, and we spread it out on the table and started looking through the maps. Bon Bon helped! A little. Mostly, she recognized the kitchens as being the kitchens and not Luna’s chambers, since nothing was labelled except for a few tourist attractions.

There were a lot of kitchens!

We narrowed it down to half a dozen likely locations. “Your best bet’s probably the Tower of the Moon,” Spike said. “It’s kind of hard to get to by hoof, but Luna can fly.”

“I’d check the old barracks first,” Bon Bon said. “Less trouble if we’re caught.”

“Can we take the book with us?” I asked, looking up at Spike.

“Why are you asking me? I’m not the librarian.” Both of us giggled at that, while Bon Bon just looked at us confused. It was kind of an in-joke – Twilight Sparkle had never actually been named the librarian of either her previous tree-brary or the current… well, I suppose it was still a library in a tree, although the tree was a fake one made out of crystal. She’d done most of the librarian’s duties willingly – I’ve never seen somepony so excited about reshelving – but she hated dealing with customers. Patrons? Visitors? I’m not actually sure what you’re supposed to call them, but at any rate she hated dealing with them, so she put a sign up on the desk she never sat behind that said the library was on the honor system.

Of course, everypony assumed she was the librarian, and nopony actually read little signs like that, so she still got asked if they could take the books with them several times a day.

I closed the book and shoved it in my saddlebag. “Well, I guess I’ll see you later, Spike! Unless Princess Luna turns me into a blind gargoyle who hunts by sense of smell or something. In which case I’ll smell you later.”

“Is she going to do that?” Spike asked, his eyes going wide.

“I don’t know! She said she was looking for monsters for her entourage. She might have just meant because I’m so fascinated with, you know.” Spike nodded. He knew. “But Bon Bon thinks she might want some scary living statues to jump out and mutilate intruders.”

“That was just an example,” Bon Bon grumbled.

Just as we were leaving, Spike called out after us, “Hey! Do you think she needs a dragon?”

“I have no idea, but you’re always welcome to come with me, Spike,” I said, lifting a forehoof off the ground as Bon Bon’s presence kept me from bouncing.

===

So we headed down to the train station. I know what you’re thinking – ‘it was the middle of the week, don’t any of you have jobs’? And the answer is… not really. I’m an itinerant musician and self-employed composer, Bonnie sells her candy on weekends, but otherwise just takes odd jobs from the civic work pool, and Spike – well, Spike really wanted to be out of the library until Twilight recovered. Magic flu wasn’t physically debilitating, but it tended to turn ponies into mopey layabouts until they got their cutie marks back.

The train wasn’t very crowded, in the middle of the day in the middle of the week. We weren’t the only ponies getting on at Ponyville, but most of the passengers were coming from Hoofington or farther west. Even with that, there were still more empty seats than not, and not nearly enough of a crowd to hide us from Diamond Tiara.

“Oh look, it’s Bon Bon and Liar Liar,” came her snarky, piercing voice, over the general hubbub of the crowd, and like an idiot I looked over at the source.

“Oh, hey there, DeeTee,” I said, smiling and waving in the most ironic way possible, which was probably indistinguishable from ordinary smiling and waving. “Where’s your slightly less annoying half?” I added, as I noticed she was sitting alone.

“Ugh,” she said, with a look of disgust. “Spoon came down with the Magic Flu, and the only pony who wanted to come with me was Pipsqueak.”

“I told you not to let him get under your tail,” Bon Bon grumbled.

“I know, I know,” she whined. “I thought he deserved a reward for helping out with the dragons, but now he thinks we’re actually an item.” She snored. “As if.”

“Sing it, sister,” Spike said, sitting down next to her as she made room. I twitched a bit as Bon Bon sat in the seat across from them. Were we really going to spend the whole train ride with her? “Some ponies just won’t take a hint, no matter how obvious you try to be.”

“I don’t really get the whole ‘hinting’ thing,” I said. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to just say what you mean? ‘I hate you, Diamond Tiara, please remove yourself from my presence and never return!’ That sort of thing.”

“Oh, I’ve tried it,” Spike said. “It doesn’t work. It just encourages them to try harder.”

“I know! It’s like they can’t imagine that anypony could actually be repulsed by their presence,” Tiara said. “They just laugh it off like you were joking.”

“I just assume that everypony hates me,” Bon Bon said. “Then I stick around out of spite.”

Reluctantly, I sat down next to Bonnie, right across from Spike. I curled my tail around my flank, and looked around at the other passengers, but none of them were doing anything interesting, so I had no choice but to pay attention to Diamond Tiara.

“I really do hate you,” I said to Diamond Tiara, after a few moment of silence. “I’m not joking.”

“No you don’t,” she said. “You’re attracted to me, but too intimidated to ask me to be your domme.”

“My what?” I blinked. I mean, yes, I knew what the word meant, and I had to admit that I did have a slight thing for pain and stuff, but the organized dominant/submissive thing never really did it for me. There were too many rules, and the outfits were really tacky. I’d let Derpy have a go at me once, and it had just been awkward all around. Also, I ended up in the hospital after she set me on fire. Never was able to figure out just what went wrong.

“And you’re worried that Bon Bon would get jealous,” she added.

“We’re just roommates,” I said, putting a hoof over Bon Bon’s shoulder. She nuzzled into my mane. “We’re not in any sort of relationship other than that.”

“Whatever,” she said, smirking. I could have sworn I saw a little fang glinting from between her lips.

What? No, we are just roommates. Bon Bon’s strictly monogamous – if she had a special somepony, she’d never cheat on them, or let them cheat on her. And what with Spike, and Derpy, and you know, Cloud Kicker’s whole set – yeah, I could never be her marefriend. But there’s no rule against roommates banging each other.

And yeah, I love her, but I love a lot of ponies. And at least one dragon. But not Diamond Tiara. Not in a thousand years.

===

Amazingly, the train ride wasn’t awful. Spike and DeeTee seemed to be able to chat with each other casually, which I blame entirely on Spike’s good nature. I spent most of the ride going over the siren songs in my head, occasionally playing a few notes softly, or humming a bit of the tune. I did make sure that Spike gave Bon Bon one of his backrubs, since for once they were both in the same place. She actually admitted she enjoyed it, which means that it must have been the best thing since cut hay. It was good to confirm that it wasn’t just me – nopony can resist the claws.

At any rate, I was able to avoid thinking about Diamond Tiara too much, and then we arrived and could finally leave her presence. Or so I thought.

“Well, have fun in Canterlot, Spike, Bon Bon, Liar,” she started.

She mispronounces my name on purpose. I don’t bother to call her on it since she’d just claim she was saying ‘Lyre’, and also I do tend to lie a lot. I’ve spent years cultivating a reputation for exaggeration and dishonesty, in fact! Just because I know she’s saying it in a mean way doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t come off as a jerk for getting on her case.

“I’d looove to spend more time with you, but I have an appointment with the Princess.” She struck a pose, raising her muzzle into the air, almost like an actual native of Canterlot. “She wants to interview me for a position in her entourage.”

My heart sunk, my coat bristled, and a cold spike shot through me. “Which princess?” I asked. Please say Celestia, please say Celestia.

“I don’t see why it matters,” she said, with a sniff. “Any princess is royalty, and being the entourage to royalty is the first step in acquiring a noble title. When I told my father I’d need a break from my internship in Barnyard Bargains, he was very encouraging, even if it wasn’t Princess Celestia.”

“Is it Princess Luna?” I asked. “Please tell me you’re not here to talk to Luna too.”

“Get your hooves off me!” she snapped, and I stepped back, not having actually realized I’d leapt at her and grabbed her. She glowered at me. “So she invited you too. I should have known.”

“Huh. I guess we’ll be travelling together a bit longer then?” Spike said. “To the palace!”

“Don’t worry,” I said, smirking at DeeTee, who followed after us with no hint of her former boastfulness. “I’m sure you’ll make a wonderful monster. Did you tell your daddy why she’d picked you?”

“Ruthlessness is nothing to be ashamed of,” she replied.

“Whatever you say!” I giggled, and may have bounced a few times as we walked down the street. Probably not, though. Bon Bon was there.

To Be a Bat

The armor didn’t fit. There was only one size, and it didn’t fit any of us.

After a fruitless search for a helmet with a hole for my horn, I balanced one of them on my head and turned to look at the rest of the armor which Spike was sorting by component, although he’d mixed all the horseshoes together in one pile for some reason. It was all clearly exactly the same size.

“I’ll help you with your armor, DeeTee,” Pipsqueak said eagerly, hovering over the scowling earth pony’s shoulders.

“I don’t think so,” she replied. “In fact, you and Spike should leave the room until we’re finished dressing.”

“Not this again,” Spike said, rubbing his forehead with one of his claws.

“It’s not decent!” Diamond Tiara replied firmly, glowering.

Spike waved his claws in the air. “You girls go around naked all the time. What are we going to see that we haven’t seen a million times?”

“Want me to show you?” I offered, with a grin. Everyone got really quiet.

“Wait, you mean there really is something?” Spike asked, scrunching his eyebrow-ridges.

I swished my hips back and forth, as I closed in on the puzzled drake. “Help me put on my armor, and I’ll show you,” I said, rubbing up against him. I winced a bit as he set one of his claws on the helmet, pressing it uncomfortably against my horn.

We started with the horse shoes. They were made out of a nearly weightless purple material – at first I thought it was some sort of ceramic, since it didn’t seem to have the heat conductivity of a metal, and ceramic was a commonly used substitute. But they were a bit flexible, and really oddly shaped. They didn’t want to go onto my hooves – not because they were too large, or too small, but because they weren’t exactly hoof-shaped. With a few stomps, and some help from Spike, I managed to get them onto my front hooves, but it was pretty uncomfortable.

For the back shoes, I had to flop onto my side so that I could reach down with my mouth and try to tug the rear set on. For shoes that you couldn’t just step into, this was always a step that involved a lot of weird contortion, and there was no way that my tail was going to keep my bits covered during the process, even if I’d been trying. The other girls politely looked away, but Pipsqueak and Spike were staring. I flicked my tail and whipped Spike’s muzzle, and he lifted his head to look me in the eye. I raised an eyebrow at him.

“Okay,” he said. “I get the picture. I’ll… I’ll be outside.”

“Aww, I don’t mind if you see me, Spike,” I said, tickling him under his chin with my tail tip. The air was a little chilly between my legs, for increasingly obvious reasons.

“I do,” DeeTee said. “Show’s over. Colts wait outside.”

Spike had to drag Pipsqueak out by his tail. Once the door slammed, I rolled the rest of the way onto my back and laughed. Bonnie clocked me upside the head for corrupting the innocent, but it was totally worth it. I mean, I had a Luna-forsaken helmet on. I barely felt it.

The armor still didn’t fit, although the material was weirdly flexible, so we were able to at least squeeze into it. There were huge slits in the sides for wings, which most of us didn’t have, and the hole for the tail in the back was tiny – and even after I painfully threaded my tail through it, the dark purple tail-cover floated up on the mass of hair as if it was designed for ponies who’d shaved themselves bare. And the breastplate… I didn’t even know what to make of it. It was solid, and stiff, made out of actual metal, but it only attached to the armor at a single point, flaring out to the sides around a huge gem shaped like an eye.

I was getting weird vibes from the gem, so I used a simple detection spell on it. “Oh wow,” I said, twisting my head to try to get a look at it. “This is some serious magic.”

“What does it do?” Bonnie asked, as I reached up and poked at it.

I yelped and cowered back, as I suddenly felt disoriented and sick, like all my insides were being stirred with a splintery wooden spoon – it didn’t quite hurt, but it was flirting with some serious, mind-shattering pain that kept building up but then twisting aside just before actually hurting.

Also, I was completely blind. It was like I’d been lurking in a dark room, and someone suddenly turned on the lights.

After a few seconds, both sensations faded, and I noticed that the armor fit like a glove. My hooves weren’t being squeezed, my sides weren’t being pinched, and the helmet was sitting flat on my head.

The second thing I noticed was that the room had gotten a whole lot brighter, like someone had torn off the roof to let the sun shine in directly instead of filtering in through the windows.

“Oh,” Bonnie said, peering at me. “Does it hurt?”

“No…” I said, uncertainly, looking back at myself and seeing a pair of purple bat wings folded against my sides. I spread one tentatively, folding the little bony fingers in and out and watching the membrane stretch. “But wow, your voice sounds weird.” I paused. “And mine sounds even weirder.”

“That’s because you’re a bat,” Fluttershy said, closing her eyes and pressing the gem on her own suit of armor. She froze up and stood there shivering for a bit, as her coat changed colors, her wings lost their feathers, and her mane and tail vanished under the armor. “Oh dear,” she said, looking a bit ill. She opened her eyes – golden now, and slitted like a cat’s – then opened her mouth and licked at a pair of vicious fangs with a long, slender tongue, almost like a dragon’s. “I do hope we’re not vampire bat ponies.”

“I hope we can change back,” Bonnie said, as she went through her own transformation. She seemed to take it worst of all, falling to her knees and groaning.

I looked up expectantly at Diamond Tiara, to find her looking back at the three of us in horror.

“Hey look!” I said, stretching my wings out, and giving a few experimental flaps. The transformation must have included some instincts or something, because I was able to hover off the ground easily enough. “Wings!”

===

The lure of wings was enough to convince Diamond Tiara to transform, although she got bored with them after a few minutes and started complaining about the bat-pony form’s other peculiarities. I had to agree with her about the ears – how was I supposed to play music when everything sounded so off? Well, yes, the obvious answer was that I’d have to experiment with new chords and sounds until I found something that sounded good to bat-pony ears, and maybe play off the weird echolocation sense we got whenever Fluttershy squeaked? But that would end up with music that nopony could appreciate except for the six of us, and possibly Princess Luna, and I didn’t really want to be that Avant Garde. I wanted to be quirky enough to remember, and fake the rest of the quirkiness while still retaining broad appeal.

Bon Bon – at least, I think it was Bonnie, since the phrasing sounded like hers, but we were all identical down to the voices so I couldn’t really be sure of anypony but DeeTee who I’d watched transform and then started commiserating with – suggested I work some sort of transformation magic into my performance, but while I was trying to explain that gassing the crowd with magical hallucinogens would probably get me run out of most towns before I could finish my set, Pipsqueak and Spike finished putting on their armor, and we decided to head down to meet Luna.

“Aren’t you going to transform?” I asked Spike. “You just tap the eye gem thing.”

“I tried, but it doesn’t work,” he said, demonstrating. “I don’t think it’s meant for dragons.”

“Maybe you need to put on all the bits,” I suggested. He’d done an impressive job of squeezing himself into as much of the armor as possible, but he wasn’t wearing the helmet or the shoes. “Although that might require a pre-transformation transformation.”

“I just hope it doesn’t mean I’m disqualified,” he said, pouting. “Twilight’s going to be extra cranky if I have to go back now.”

We found Luna out in the yard, writing something on a big scroll, which she rolled up and hid as we came out into the light, squinting at the incredible brightness. She’d thought ahead enough to have us in a yard that was in the shadow of the castle, so at least we weren’t in direct sunlight, but the glare from the ice that covered parts of the mountain looming overhead was blinding. I tried closing my eyes and chirping, which sort of worked? But I’m not sure if I would have been able to recognize Luna if I hadn’t just seen her standing there. It would have been enough to avoid running into things while flying in the dark, but it was no real substitute for vision.

“Recruits!” Luna shouted, snapping into a posture which all of us instinctively emulated. “Form up!”

We shuffled into something resembling a line. “I’ll form the head!” I said, since I ended up near the center, which got a giggle from Spike and a confused look from the Princess. “Um… it’s a reference to popular culture. Or, well, not popular popular culture, but culture? Neighponese culture, although I think it actually –“

“Silence,” Luna said, in a perfectly normal tone of voice that brooked no hesitation or disobedience. I saluted, quietly, but she still gave me an extra add-on glower, before walking up and down the line, staring at us.

She stopped at the end of the line, where Spike was standing awkwardly, a purple drake at the head of a line of identical grey bat ponies. “Recruit number one, what is your name?”

“Um…” Spike said. “Maggot?” That got a few giggles.

Luna stomped the ground angrily. “Are any of you going to take this seriously?”

“I will sir! Ma’am! Sir! Princess, sir,” said the bat pony a couple places to my left.

Luna sighed, and smiled. “Thank you Pip – thank you, recruit five.” She frowned, and walked at a steady pace to a rack of spears. “Since the rest of the recruits seem to think this is some sort of joke, I believe we should move on to the first test, and the demonstration of just how serious this is.” Her horn lit, and the spears floated towards us. “Take your weapons!”

Spike grabbed the spear with his claws, of course, and Pipsqueak sort of fumbled with his with his mouth and one of his hooves. The rest of us stared at the spears gingerly.

It looked like a real spear. I poked a hoof against it, and found that my hooves were, in fact, cloven, and that a gap in the bottom of the shoe was sized to allow the spear to slide into place where I could grip it between both halves.

Luna returned to the line of recruits and, after nodding at Spike, went from bat pony to bat pony, showing us how to hold the spear. I’d almost gotten it right! We couldn’t really stand while holding it, but, well, we had wings, and bat ponies can hover as effortlessly as pegasi.

“Recruit number one,” she said to Spike, “Attack me with your spear. Do not hold back.”

Spike threw his spear at her. It didn’t hit. Both of them stared at the spear stuck in the ground halfway to the Princess, and off to the side by about ten degrees.

“Do not throw your spear,” Luna clarified, levitating it back to Spike. “Your spear is your weapon. If you throw your weapon, you will be unarmed. Recruit number two, attack me with your spear.”

Recruit number two stood there for a few seconds, psyching herself up with increasingly loud, heavy breathing. Finally, she tensed up, bared her fangs, and let out the cutest little war cry as she flew slowly across the field towards Luna, finally closing her eyes and poking gently at her with the spear. The spear tip didn’t reach far enough, so she drifted close and poked again.

Luna looked down at the sharp metal point resting against her hide, then reached down and pushed it aside with a hoof. Recruit two squealed, dropped her spear, and flew off to hide.

“Oh, Fluttershy,” Luna said, with a sigh. “I know you have the potential within you to be a great warrior, but how am I to draw it out?”

“Injure a firefly?” I suggested, remembering one of the stories about their old adventures Twilight had told me.

“Berserker rage has its place, but not in the hunt,” Luna replied, turning to me. “Recruit three, do you think you can manage to actually attack me?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “This spear looks real. Won’t it hurt?”

Luna smirked. “Do not worry about injuring me. A weapon such as that could never do me harm.”

I nodded, fluttered back a few feet, then charged at her with all my strength, shoving the spear at her chest with my muscles as well as my momentum.

Did I mention that the bat pony bodies we’d been given were really strong? The spear sank into Luna’s body like a knife stuck into a pumpkin, complete with the sucking pressure holding it in place afterwards. Unlike a pumpkin, the juice that squirted onto my legs and face was warm, and as I tried to wiggle it free, something in Luna’s body twitched rhythmically against it – her heart, maybe, or her lungs. I tried jerking it out, and somehow ended up shoving it in deeper, scraping against a bone or something, deep inside her. I looked up at her face to say something stupid, but the words died in my throat as I saw the look on her face.

Agony. Eyes wide, pupils contracted to tiny dots, mouth slightly agape. The spear jerked in my hooves as her muscles twitched with some instinct, trying to pull free, and then her whole body dissolved into black mist, flowing off the spear like cotton candy off a spindle, a sticky sensation on my face marking where the blood that had splattered there peeled itself off as vapor, to join the cloud.

When she reformed a few feet to the side, she’d regained her composure. There was no sign of any wound. Just as she’d said, these weapons couldn’t injure her. But it had definitely hurt.

She looked back at me, and nodded. “Very good, recruit three.”

I noticed I was breathing heavily, and licked my lips as I floated back into the line. I flopped onto my rear, propping my front half up with my spear. My heart was racing, and everything was tingling with adrenaline. I couldn’t believe it. I’d actually stabbed somepony. A Princess! Hard enough that if they’d been mortal, they’d probably have died.

I was so turned on. I wanted to do it again.

Unfortunately, it was Recruit Four’s turn, and judging by the way she was bitching at Luna about deserving a second chance (on the first try they’d stabbed her in the leg, and at least drawn blood, which Luna said was ‘adequate’) it was probably Diamond Tiara.

“It’s not a fair test! You say you need us to fight monsters, but you’re asking us to stab a Princess!”

“I thought that would make it easier for you,” Luna said, frowning with something other than disapproval for once. “There can be no question that I consent to your assault, since I was the one who ordered it.”

“Well, it doesn’t,” said Pipsqueak. I mean, number five. “We love you, Princess, and when you were stabbed, you were hurt! We don’t want to hurt you.”

Luna nodded. “Very well. Recruit number three, stand forwards.”

It took me a second to realize she meant me, but then I was back in the air, swooping towards her. She tore the spear from my grip, grabbed me in her magic, and set me next to her, in the middle of the field. “Would she make a better target?”

“Oh, yes,” Diamond Tiara said, with a nasty little grin.

“Do I get a say in this?” I asked.

“Do not fear,” Luna told me, “for the body you wear is made of shadowstuff, the same as mine. You will not die.”

That sounded like ‘no’. Then again, she wasn’t holding me in place with her magic, or paralyzing me or anything like that. I could have flown away. But part of me… part of me wanted to feel it, to know what it was like. If Luna was telling the truth – and I had no reason to doubt her – then it would just be like the Taffy incident. So part of me said that it wasn’t that unreasonable of a request, to stand there and get stabbed.

The rest of me was pretty damn scared, but reacting by freezing in place, instead of running.

Then there was a loud ‘clang’, and I stumbled back a few steps, my chest aching but not pierced.

“It’s not fair! She’s got armor on!” Diamond Tiara complained.

I lifted a hoof to my bruised chest, but all I could touch was the breastplate, which didn’t accomplish much. Probably for the best, nothing good comes from picking at an injury. “It wasn’t even your turn!”

“She said we could get a do-over,” DeeTee said.

“You didn’t need a do-over! You’d already passed!”

“Recruit number five,” Luna said, “You may strike at recruit number three or four, at your preference. Please try to kill one of them, I tire of their bickering.”

Pipsqueak looked at me, then at DeeTee, then back at me, and shrugged. “Sorry, Lyra. I’ll try to make it quick.”

Then that little asshole stabbed me in the gut. I mean, yes, there weren’t a whole lot of unarmored places, and I guess I wasn’t making it easy for him to aim, since me and Diamond Tiara were both fleeing for our ‘not-getting-stabbed’s, but when you say ‘I’ll make it quick’ that’s about the last place in the world that you go and stab somepony!

Did you know that flying flexes your belly muscles? It’s not something you’d normally think about, but when you’ve got a big spear stuck in your gut and each flap of your wings feels like it’s about to tear your belly open, it’s pretty obvious. I’m not actually sure how I got to the ground without killing myself – I was at least fifty feet off the ground – but somehow my random fluttering let me hit the ground at a less than fatal speed. Maybe it’s a pegasus thing that bat ponies also have; I’ve heard about Rainbow Dash running into mountains and libraries and things, and walking away unhurt.

I was pretty hurt, although that was because of the spear.

It honestly felt like I’d been torn open and disemboweled, although I got a look at it and the entry wound hadn’t really ripped open or anything like that. Instead, the spear had jostled all around inside me, slicing everything up, to the point where any move I made, no matter how small, was agonizing. It hurt too much to scream.

I was still floundering around in a pool of my own blood, when some bat pony or other stood over me, with another spear, and stuck it right in my eye. That’s how you make it quick.

Death and Consequences

I woke up sprawled on the floor of the lounge where we’d put on our armor, a mint-colored unicorn again, with all my internal organs whole and undamaged. I curled up and cried for a bit, twitching every time the memory of the pain threatened to rise up and take me. I couldn’t think of anything but Pipsqueak, stabbing me in the belly, and leaving the spear there, while I flapped around, crunched to the ground, and slowly bled to death. Over and over, each sensation catalogued and filed under ‘ow’.

After a while, I realized I was masturbating. It didn’t take long to finish – aside from my crazy fantasies, simply not being in agony felt so good. If the others heard me scream out in climax, I guess they wrote it off to anguish and stuff? Or maybe they were just polite. Nopony ever mentioned to me if they knew what I’d done.

Once I was feeling better, I took my time putting on another set of armor, turned myself back into a bat pony, and headed out to join the others again.

Luna was surprised to see me. Bonnie – I assume it was Bonnie, it might have been Fluttershy – was really, really relieved to see me alive, and gave me a big hug.

“Is there some reason you had to make it hurt so much?” I asked Luna.

“Pain still serves its purpose,” Luna replied. “In time, you will learn to ignore it, when needed.”

I thought back to when I’d stabbed her, to the expression on her face. To how long she’d let me hold the spear inside her, before turning to mist and ending the pain. She hadn’t been ignoring it. She’d been savoring it.

She was as crazy as me. I grinned at the thought, and took my place in the next exercise, which was…

I don’t actually remember what we did next, sorry. We did a lot of training stuff, and it kind of all blended into each other. We learned to fight with spears, for real, and how to use these weird, flexible blades glued to our wings, and sharp little spring-loaded knives that we could hide in our boots. We also did a lot of flying around in circles, and running through the Royal Guard obstacle course, when they weren’t using it. It was a whole training montage!

The first night – well, the first morning, since she had us up all night training – we were so tired we basically slept in our armor. I woke up sometime late afternoon, curled up with somepony that I hoped was Bon Bon because it certainly wasn’t Spike, drooling on her breastplate. I must have jostled her awake, because her eyes opened as well, and I stared into the strange, slitted pupils until Luna stomped in and shouted us back out to the training fields.

The second morning, she had us kill each other. “Form up in pairs, and show me what you’ve learned. Survivors face off against each other. The winner will have the honor of sparring with me.” Her grin had fangs.

After picking up a spear at the weapon rack, I waved at Spike, and he nodded and lined up across from me. Glancing to the side, I saw DeeTee facing off against Pipsqueak – I could tell because they’d both picked wing blades, although until one talked I wouldn’t be sure who was who – and Bonnie with a set of clawed boots staring in dismay at Fluttershy’s back as she stood at the weapon rack, breathing heavily.

“Actually,” I said to Spike, “I’d better switch off. Bonnie!”

“But Lyyyyra,” Spike said, glancing at the advancing bat pony. “She’s scary!”

I rolled my eyes. “You have impenetrable scales.” I prodded at him with my spear to demonstrate. “Don’t be gentle. She likes it rough.”

Then I fluttered over to ‘Shy,who’d settled on the claws and was shaking as she put them on, one by one. I set down my spear, and wrapped my arms around her from behind.

Her squeal was hypersonic.

“Shhh,” I said, nibbling her ear. “Don’t be scared.”

“How can I not be scared!” she whimpered.

“It’s just pain,” I said. “And that’s only if you lose.”

She didn’t seem reassured. “Of course I’m going to lose. I don’t think I can even – why did Luna bring me here?”

“Look, plenty of things hurt that aren’t scary,” I said, leaning down and helping her with her weapons. “Like the dentist. You’re not scared of the dentist, are you?”

“I haven’t been to the dentist since I was ten,” she said, pouting and tossing her head to hide her face behind her mane, which didn’t work since her bat-pony mane was too short and trapped beneath her helmet besides. “I just brush a lot.”

I stared, and tried to remember if I’d ever seen her teeth. Would that work? Because honestly, I was a lot more scared of the dentist than I was of getting clawed to death.

“Let’s just get this over with,” she said.

I shrugged, and picked up my spear. Remembering what Luna had taught us, I did a quick feint directly at her eyes to make her flinch, and… she curled up in a ball, quivering.

“That is not how you parry,” Luna said, suddenly appearing at our side. She uncurled Fluttershy with her magic and set her back down in front of me. “Her spear is clumsy and slow, but has reach. Knock it aside, then move in for the kill.”

I glanced over at the other pairs. Bon Bon must have already died, since Spike was standing alone, leaning on a spear and rubbing at some slight scratches that hadn’t penetrated his scales. Pip had managed to cut off one of Diamond Tiara’s wings, and she’d picked it up in her teeth and was screaming in outrage while chasing him around with it.

“Okay,” Fluttershy said, bringing me back to my own contest. “I’m ready.” She was at least in the right posture, and had a determined look in her slitted yellow eyes. I did a quick feint at her face to make her flinch, and she squeaked and turned to run.

I grabbed her left hind leg in my jaws, my fangs sinking into her ankle, and she wailed as I dragged her down and slammed her on her back. I swooped around and clocked her in the side of the helmet as she tried to stand up, then hovered over her, aimed my spear, and – and I couldn’t do it. I mean, it was Fluttershy, and she was crying and pissing herself in fear. I felt like I wanted to throw up.

“What are you waiting for?” she wailed, flailing at me blindly with a clawed hoof.

“Strike fast, and true,” Luna said in my ear.

“Can’t I just ask for her to surrender?” I asked.

“I surrender!”

“There is no surrender in this. She is your enemy, she must die.”

I gritted my teeth, and plunged the spear into her throat. It was sharp; there was barely any resistance as I pinned her to the ground by her neck. Fluttershy spasmed, and her mouth opened and closed, blood leaking from the corner of her mouth, one hoof raised to paw at the spear, the claws scraping harmlessly off the haft.

“She’s not dying,” I hissed.

“Yes, she is,” Luna said. “But if you want an instantly fatal blow, strike here.” She indicated a spot on Fluttershy’s chest.

I braced my rear hooves against her belly, pulled back the spear from the gushing wound in her neck, and let out a quick ‘huff’ as I plunged it into her heart. Orange crawling sparks lit everywhere across her hide, and the quiet flames rapidly consumed her, leaving a pony-shaped statue of ash, which collapsed into a quickly dispersing cloud. In seconds, nothing remained but the armor, which flashed and vanished.

“Well, done,” Luna said, patting me on the back with her feathery wing. I still felt sick.

A little later, after getting my throat slit by a surprisingly vicious one-winged Tiara, I tracked Fluttershy down to the showers, where she was sobbing under a stream of hot water, her sodden feathery wings splayed out along the tiles, her mane soaked and in disarray.

“Are you okay?” I asked, stepping onto the tiles, and tossing my mane aside as the water started to splash on me.

She squeaked – in the normal, audible spectrum this time – and scuttled back into the far corner, where she crouched like a cornered rat.

I was starting to suspect that she was not okay.

I rubbed at my throat, remembering the tearing agony as Diamond Tiara had dragged the sharp end of her severed wing through it… the sudden weakness that had come over me… the slow fade into an ever-so-brief darkness before waking up back in the lounge. “Was it really that bad?” I asked.

Fluttershy gave a couple of shuddering sobs, before answering, “Yes!”

She headed home on the morning train. Spike went with her, although he promised he’d be back after he was sure she was going to be okay. Luna promised to have a set of armor that would actually transform a dragon ready by then.

The rest of us closed the blackout curtains, and crawled into bed. I slept alone, that day – I didn’t really feel very cuddly.

The First Mission

After that, the four of us slipped into a routine. We’d awake midday, and have some free time to relax or explore Canterlot in our usual bodies, while Luna attended to her Princessly duties, and then after moonrise, we’d suit up and gather out in the yard for another night of training, finished off by a fight to the death. I managed to ‘win’, once, and got to face off against Luna. That was a really short fight.

I heard later that actual Royal Guards train for about six months before they graduate and get sent on assignment, assuming they don’t wash out. Luna took us out on our first mission after a week.

Spike still hadn’t returned, so it was just the four of us, lined up ready to start the night’s training, only for Luna to conjure up a Flashback Window instead. It showed a small group of diamond dogs, gathered around a fire, gnawing on a denuded carcass. The carcass of a pony. Or maybe a sheep or goat or a baby cow or something, but it was a pony-shaped animal about pony size.

Okay, spoiler alert – it was a pony. And not the first one they’d eaten.

“This tribe of diamond dogs has been causing trouble for weeks in the northern plains,” Luna explained. “Gems have been stolen. Houses, burned. Ponies have gone ‘missing’.” I winced as I watched one of the dogs crack open a bone to get at the marrow. “Tomorrow, Princess Celestia intends to lead a detachment of the Royal Guard to chase them out of Equestrian territory. For crimes such as theirs, she sentences them to banishment.”

“Well, good,” Diamond Tiara said from her place next to me. She was still ‘recruit four’, even with one and two missing. “They deserve it.”

“They deserve far worse!” Luna proclaimed, rearing up and stomping her forehooves. “And you will give them exactly what they deserve. When the Royal Guard arrives, they will find nothing but corpses!”

I glanced down the line at ‘recruit six’, who glanced back at me, and shrugged. “Yeah, okay,” I said. “I can’t argue that they deserve it. Do you really think we’re ready?”

“You will not be sent into battle unprepared,” Luna replied, striking a pose as her horn glowed, the glow flowing over each of us, snapping into a skin-tight forcefield. “Their claws will not penetrate that shield, although you should still strive to catch them on your armor. I also have gifts, for each of you.”

She started at the far end of the line, attaching a set of matte black claws to Bon Bon’s hooves. “Candy Pony, for you I have a set of admantium claws. They will cut through anything, even a dragon’s hide.”

“So don’t use them on Spike,” I added.

Luna ignored me, and moved on to Pipsqueak. “To my first and most loyal follower, the wingblades of Hurricane’s legion. Ever –sharp, and as unbreakable as your loyalty.”

“Thank you, Princess!” Pip said, with the wing-salute Luna had drilled us on after getting tired of seeing us try to salute with our hooves, like the Royal Guard. “I’ll put them to good use!”

“I know,” she replied, and moved on to Diamond Tiara. Instead of a replacement for her favored wing blades, she handed her a small sheath, for a mouth-wielded sword. “You cannot always count on the enemy being kind enough to slice off your wings, so for you, a blade.” Luna strapped the hilt to the bat pony’s side, and DeeTee leaned down and drew the sword. It was short, and curved – a falchion, I think? It was also translucent, and gave off a faint blue glow. “Made from thunderclouds in the ancient Sky Forge, before it was destroyed by the dragons. The slightest touch will send lightning through your enemy’s body, paralyzing them.” She frowned a bit at Tiara’s grip. “You will need to learn to use it properly, but your natural talent is undeniable.”

“Wow,” Pip said, looking envious. “Can I have one of those?”

“No,” Luna replied. “I was able to remove one from the armory without comment, but taking several would arouse suspicion. Thus, from my own collection…” she stood before me, and passed me an evil spear.

Seriously, it was the evilest spear I’d ever seen. The haft was wrapped in a dull black material that felt almost like skin, and the point of the spear was made out of chipped bone. It glowed, but not the pure blue of the sword. It glowed… green? Purple? Black? It glowed a color that was green and purple and black all at once, and above all, evil.

“It was once wielded by Scorpan himself, before Star Swirl convinced him to turn to the path of harmony. It will drain the magic from anypony you strike with it. Its name is Cutie Breaker.”

“It’s whispering,” I said, quietly, as I held the spear in my forehooves. “In my head. Can you make it stop?” The whispering continued, just faint enough that I couldn’t make out any real words, just hints that made my skin crawl. “Better yet, can I just use a normal spear?”

“THOU WOULDST SPURN A GIFT GIVEN TO THEE BY THY PRINCESS?” Luna shouted, right in my face.

Did I mention that bat ponies have really sensitive ears? After mine stopped ringing, I tried to force myself to meet Luna’s gaze, but I couldn’t do it. Staring off to the side, ears folded flat, I asked, “I just mean… aren’t we supposed to be the good guys?”

Luna laughed. “Good is for the Royal Guard,” she said, pacing back and forth before us, no longer focusing on me in particular. “Good is for the Elements of Harmony. We,” she turned to face us, and spread her wings, “are justice. Go, my Night Guard. Dispense justice in my name!”

===

Fly my little ponies, fly!
Into the dark of the night!
Where creatures await
Their oncoming fate
La la la la something about dying…

Somepony batted me in the face with a wing. “Hey! I’m trying to make this up on the spot. I’m not a miracle worker, you know.” I’m not sure they heard me – the wind was pretty loud.

But I had to sing something, to drown out the voices. I couldn’t really make out what they were saying, but I was pretty sure they kept saying ‘Tirek’. I hummed a wordless tune a little louder.

“Can you please SHUT UP!” screeched Diamond Tiara, suddenly whirling to face me, forcing me to backpedal to avoid stabbing her with the evil spear of evilness. “We’re supposed to be sneaking! Can you try to be quiet?”

I blinked. “We’re supposed to be sneaking?” I laughed. “Wow, did Luna pick the wrong mare.”

“She didn’t say anything about sneaking,” Bon Bon said. She and Pip had joined the hover party.

“She didn’t have to,” Diamond Tiara said with a scowl. “We’re ninjas. Ninjas sneak. Now follow me in, and be QUIET!”

So we swooped down on the flickering firelight of the Diamond Dogs’ camp, quiet as a mouse. A mouse that was whistling ‘Charge of the Valkyries’. Quietly. Unfortunately, it turned out that Diamond Dogs have really good hearing, and the cave was empty by the time we reached it, with fresh holes in the walls and floors where the dogs had made their escape.

Well, not totally empty. There was the half-eaten dead unicorn. I wasn’t really an expert in dead bodies – we didn’t leave any ourselves, remember – but it didn’t look like she’d been dead for very long. Probably not as long as she’d been half-eaten. I prodded her with the butt end of my spear, just in case, but she didn’t move. “So much for a rescue.”

Diamond Taira snarled, and stomped around the cave. “Great. This is just perfect!” She slammed her hooves into one of the filled-in tunnels. “Our first mission, and LIAR ruins it!”

Claws burst from the ground, digging into her sides, pinning her wings – they probably would have slit the membranes if it wasn’t for the forcefield. DeeTee just stood there, looking shocked, even when they started to pull her down into the ground, so I poked one of the arms with Cutie Breaker.

There was a weird ghosty fwoosh, and Diamond Tiara stopped sinking. After a second, the claws released her, but still couldn’t pull back into the ground. After another second or two, they started thrashing around, as much as they could without the elbow exposed. Diamond Tiara, who’d recovered her composure after gaining a few feet of separation from the floor, drew her sword in her mouth, and swooped past, slicing both arms off at the wrists. Blood fountained into the air – getting weaker and weaker until it was nothing more than a dribble, and then nothing. Just two sliced up pieces of meat rising from a puddle of blood.

“Urrrgh!” Diamond Tiara screamed, hovering in midair and whirling around to look for any other diamond dogs. “This is all your fault, LIAR! The murderers got away and I’m completely covered in –“ she paused to give a little mid-air shiver “—dog blood!”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “For saving your life, and stuff.”

She rolled her eyes. “We can’t die, stupid,” she said, flying over and shoving me. “Maybe if you’d let them kidnap me, we could have finished the stupid mission. Stupid!” She shoved me again, and I cringed a bit, because she had a point. That said, it was obvious that she’d pulled it out of her tail-hole about two seconds ago. But far be it from me to stop someone for taking credit for something they thought up on the spur of the moment!

Bonnie, on the other three hooves, really doesn’t appreciate it when ponies try to bully me, and leapt at her. The two of them hit the ground, flailing and pounding on each others’ armor, since DeeTee didn’t know how to use her sword in close combat, and Bon Bon was sticking to flat-hoof strikes instead of using her claws.

That’s when the rest of the dogs attacked.

Have you ever seen a Flashback Window of the battle of the Elements of Harmony against the Changeling Swarm? Six mares, surrounded by dozens of enemies, kicking total butt thanks to their well-practiced fighting skills and the enemies all being approximately two weeks old.

It was sort of like that, except that the outnumbered side was also the side that had no idea what they were doing. The dogs punched us, and clawed at us, and picked us up and threw us, slammed us into each other, bit us, and tried to twist our limbs all out of joint. We barely had time to take a swipe here and there between blows and throws and tackles.

But, well, here’s the thing. None of that really hurt. Most of our bodies were covered in surprisingly tough armor, and the rest was protected by an alicorn-level force field. They made a few attempts to disarm us, but Tiara’s sword was all lightning and sharp edges, Pip and Bonnie had weapons that were firmly attached with straps and clasps and things, and Cutie Breaker objected to anypony but me touching it – after the first dog saw his claw wither to uselessness, they stopped trying to grab it.

So the dogs were hitting us and hitting us and beating us and kicking us while we were down, but accomplishing buck-all, and meanwhile… we had time to take a swipe here and there.

Cutie Breaker weakened any dog it so much as touched, and I was flailing around with it like my life depended on it! Which it totally didn’t, but I wasn’t really thinking about that at the time. I don’t think I ever got in a solid strike, but any dog that blocked the nasty thing got its magic stolen. Pretty soon, that was all of them.

Tiara’s sword didn’t do much to the diamond dogs at first, but once they were drained of magic they lost a lot of their crazy strength and toughness, and its little lightning bolts started to sting. Not to mention, between the sword, Bonnie’s claws, and Pip and Tiara’s wing blades, the dogs were all cut up, after a while, and losing enough blood eventually slows you down.

One of them decided it was time to bug out, but without his magic he couldn’t dig, and it left him open. I leapt at him with my spear – but a dog grabbed my rear ankles and used me as a bludgeon to smack Bonnie and Pip across the room. So, Diamond Tiara got that kill, her sword sizzling as it plunged into his back. I don’t know if she hit any particularly vital area, but the dog shuddered and shook as the lightning coursed through him, and when his fur started to blacken, she pulled her sword back, and the body that hit the ground was… not alive. It was smoking, and both his eyes were blackened pits.

Sadly, this made several other dogs try to dig their way out of the cave. Sadly for them. Sadly for the rest, since without quite as much of a disadvantage in numbers, we started being able to actually fight back.

The last three dogs tried to run, out of the cave, along the surface. That was a mistake. We could still fly faster than a magic-drained diamond dog could run, despite the beating we’d taken. We could see in the dark as easily as most ponies could see in the day, so we weren’t going to lose them. And we’d all spent the last week doing drills, one of which was ‘running down a fleeing enemy’. DeeTee and Bonnie did textbook take-downs on the two flankers, and Pipsqueak… well, after hamstringing all four legs, let’s just say he made the last one scream for a while, until I started to get bored and put it out of its misery.

“Can we go home now?” I said, breathing heavily. Even when your enemies can’t actually hurt you, fighting is exhausting.

“No way,” Pip said. “We killed the monsters, now we get to go count our loot!”

“So we’re playing Ogres and Oubliettes now?” I asked, rolling my eyes.

“We kind of are,” Bon Bon said. “Luna’s version of it anyway.”

“Diamond Dogs collect gems, right?” Diamond Tiara asked, with a grin.

So we headed back to the cave, and sure enough there was a small stash of diamonds and stuff off in a corner, hidden under a heap of gnawed pony bones. Creatures sometimes have weird ideas about how squeamish ponies are. Did they really think we weren’t going to search there? I guess it’s possible they just thought it would make a lot of noise if a thief tried to sneak in and search it.

Pip tried searching through the belly of one of the diamond dogs to see if there were any gems in its stomach. One. We made him stop after one, because of the stench. He didn’t argue.

I wrinkled my nose. “And I thought they smelled bad on the –“

“Don’t,” Bon Bon said, putting a hoof on my muzzle. “This isn’t the time for jokes.”

“It isn’t?” I looked around, and there weren’t any threats. All the diamond dogs were lying dead around us, or dead out in the field, and I was getting a bit giddy from excitement and relief. I started giggling, and for once the evil spear felt just the same as I did, because it was giggling right along with me.

“We just killed a dozen people. That’s not something we should laugh about.”

“They weren’t people,” Diamond Tiara said. “They were diamond dogs.”

“Still people,” Bon Bon said. “Bad people, but you can’t just kill them and feel nothing.”

“I feel…” I said, grinning widely, “I feel like I want to dance. Is that wrong?” Bon Bon stared at me, those slitted yellow bat eyes glaring into my soul. “Want to dance?” I asked her, offering her a hoof, while clutching Cutie Breaker with my other foreleg.

Before she could tell me to grow up and hit me, Pip called from the back of the cave, where he’d found a little alcove that turned out to be a large enough room for him to vanish into. “Hey girls, I found some more!”

What he’d found was the diamond dogs’ civilians.

Turning the corner to join him put us in a kitchen of horrors, with a giant spit roaster with one of the dead unicorn’s missing legs on the spit. There was a drying rack where the hides of at least three ponies were stretched out and being prepared. There was a table, where someone was stuffing… stuff into what looked like they might have been intestines? I don’t know – carnivore food is weird and gross. And there at the back of the room were a pair of cooks, wearing very colorful aprons. With cutie marks. They were standing between Pipsqueak and a dozen diamond dog pups of various ages, and trying to surrender.

One of them wailed, “We no eat ponies no more! We leave and go home! Never return!”

“Murdering scum like you doesn’t get to just go home and be forgiven,” Pipsqueak said, flicking his wings at them and making them cower back farther.

“Never murder any pony! Not hunters!” the other one tried to explain.

“Are you sure you need our help?” I asked, leaning on Cutie Breaker to let my wings get some rest. “They don’t look like much of a threat.”

Pipsqueak glanced back over his shoulder and grinned, showing his fangs. “Nah, I just wanted you to be here to see this.” He reared up on his hind legs, leapt into the air, and spun around like a ballerina, the blades attached to his wings slipping under the cowering diamond dogs’ chins to slit both their throats simultaneously. Blood splattered across the wall, then started to run down and stain their gruesome aprons, while they clutched at their necks and collapsed, trying to scream without breath. Pipsqueak landed with his back to the twitching corpses, and bowed.

I stomped the ground appreciatively, since it was a fairly graceful performance, and I was in a good mood. DeeTee joined in, politely.

Bon Bon just stood there, and grunted, then asked (once the applause had died down), “What are we going to do about the puppies?”

“I don’t know, I’m getting kind of tired. I didn’t have anything special planned for them,” Pipsqueak said, turning back to the whining pile of miserable dog fur. “I figure we just kill them however. There’s, what, three for each of us?”

“Do you really think Luna wants us to kill puppies?” I asked. Cutie Breaker answered, in a chorus of gibbering wails. I smacked it against the table. “No. Bad. I don’t care what you think.”

“She said to leave nothing but corpses…” Diamond Tiara said, nose wrinkling as she stared at the puppies.

“Yeah, technically, but does it really make sense to stand on a technicality when we’re discussing something like killing innocent puppies? She probably didn’t even think about the possibility – I know I didn’t. I thought this was a raiding party, not an actual attempt at colonization.”

“If they were planning to move in, that makes it worse,” Bon Bon said.

“It’s three to one,” Pipsqueak said. “They die.”

I hate democracy.

“Wait!” DeeTee said, as Pipsqueak grabbed the first of the cowering children by the ears and dragged a wingblade across her throat. He ignored her, and grabbed the next. “I said wait!” she repeated, following it up with a whack on the nose from her sword.

Pipsqueak hissed as lightning crackled over his face, and dropped the dog.

“We never held a stupid vote,” she said, smacking him again. “And stop putting words in my mouth! I don’t want your stupid second hand words.” She smacked him again, this time on the rear as he turned away from her, wings held up to cover his face. “They’re probably all covered in –“

He bucked her in the face, knocking her back into the wall.

“This is a test!” he said, turning back to face us, as Diamond picked herself up, face contorted in rage. “She did know they were here. She told us to kill everything. This is a test of our loyalty, and I’m not going to fail!” He slashed with his wings, slicing deep wounds in three more puppies, who started whining and trying to burrow into the walls.

“Wait a second,” I said, as Pipsqueak laid into the screaming puppies, splattering blood all over the walls and ceiling. “Are you only killing them because it’s a test? Because if it’s meant to be a test of character, you’re cheating by using meta-knowledge to decide what character to present. Even if you know it’s a test, you should treat it as if – are you even listening?” He didn’t seem to be – the last surviving puppy had managed to bite him at the base of his wing, where he couldn’t quite reach with either wing blade or his teeth, so he was flailing around and trying to slam into the blood-soaked wall, but the bodies and offal at his feet kept tripping him up.

“What?” he said, turning to look at me, while the puppy clawed hopelessly at his armor.

I pointed my spear at him. “Why are you killing them?”

He glanced down at the spear, then lunged at me, impaling his passenger. I tried to pull the spear out of the way, since I didn’t want any part of slaughtering innocents, but I was a lot slower than the guards we’d seen at the gate, and all I managed to do was somehow drive it deeper while pulling the dying puppy off his wing, so it looked like I was helping him.

“Because it’s what Luna wants,” he said, as the twitching corpse slowly slid down the length of the spear, the tip emerging from its mouth.

“That’s a horrible reason!” I said, shaking the dead puppy at him. “You should kill because it’s the right thing to do, or because they’re attacking you, or because, I don’t know. Because you enjoy it?”

“No,” Bon Bon said.

“Right, thanks, that’s a bad reason too. But blind obedience –“

“We’re her soldiers,” Pipsqueak said. “Blind obedience is exactly what she wants.”

“Ugh,” I said, lowering the spear and scraping the dead body off with a hoof. Or trying to. It was like all his muscles had tensed up at the moment of death or something, and wedged the bones against the spear so that it wouldn’t come out without breaking something. It was a lot more convenient stabbing my friends, since they crumbled to ash almost instantly. “I guess it’s a moot point now.”

“Unless there’s others hiding,” Diamond Tiara pointed out, looking around the kitchen. There weren’t any stoves or cupboards, but there were sacks and barrels that somepuppy could be hiding in. “We should probably kill all the witnesses, just in case.”

“You can stay here and murder anypony you want,” Bon Bon said. “We’re going home.” She grabbed my wing, and I let her drag me out of the cave. The others were right behind us – even Pipsqueak had apparently had his fill of murder. Besides, our orders were for the Royal Guard to find nothing but bodies, and if the dogs were hiding from us they’d probably be able to stay hidden from the Guards, since we had better vision and hearing.

I pondered what Pip would have done if we’d found any pony prisoners – the same logic that had him killing the puppies would have condemned them, as well. I was sure we’d have done something other than yell at him to stop if he’d started attacking ponies, though.

Well, almost sure. Maybe 70% sure.

Grading our Performance

Luna was waiting for us when we got back. She was not amused by our performance. Apparently, the mission had been a test, and she’d been watching us the whole time.

“My bones still ache from watching what I might generously consider a fight.” She scowled. “I gave you every advantage, and you still barely came out on top.”

“But we succeeded!” Pipsqueak pointed out. “We even got the puppies! Just like you said, nothing but corpses.”

“Were we not supposed to kill the puppies?” I asked, hopefully.

“The puppies are irrelevant,” Luna replied, with a flick of her wing. “I refer to what I was incorrectly thinking of as your fighting skill.” She opened up a flashback window, to show us flailing around randomly as the diamond dogs pummeled us, over and over and over.

But I couldn’t really focus on it. There was a song there, in my head… a lighthearted and bouncy tune, probably done with horns or a keyboard, although of course a lyre would work, since it works for everything. I didn’t have mine with me, so I settled for setting the tune to vocals, while tapping out the rhythm with my hooves. Luna was still talking in the background, but for some reason her angry diatribe in front of a flashback window full of fighting dogs and ponies made the perfect accompaniment. It went something like…

I’m usually not a very angry pony.
I’m often rather fun to be around.
I’m generally totally sane,
I’m seldom writhing in pain
At the thought of what awaits me when the sun goes down.

I usually have ordinary nightmares;
To tell the truth, they’re often totally tame.
I hardly ever wonder what is real and what’s a dream.
And when I’m awake, I usually believe that all is as it seems.
And hardly ever stick my hoof into the flame…

I almost never murder anypony.
It’s rare that I wake up all covered in blood.
I seldom steal souls,
or slit the throats of foals,
and watch them bleed their lives out into… into…

That was as far as I got, the last few lines squeezed out through clenched teeth. Bonnie rested a cloven hoof on my shoulders, and told Luna, “We’re leaving.”

The spell was broken, and Luna’s fascinated stare hardened. “You are not dismissed!”

I’m not sure if there was any more to the exchange; I’m sorry if I’m not living up to my usual standards of storytelling, but then, I’m hardly ever wracked with sobs from no obvious source to the point where I can’t really focus on anything but putting one hoof in front of the other.

It’s kind of a shame, because it’s nice to see Bon Bon being gentle, and that’s really the only time she’ll lower herself to it. She’s usually a pretty angry pony.

===

Later, I was back in Ponyville, helping out Pinkie Pie around that shop of hers. I had to take Cutie Breaker and stab all the customers to death with it, or else they’d find out that she’d run out of sugar and used moon sugar in her cupcakes instead, which isn’t really the same thing. Bon Bon tried that substitution in her candies once, and not only did all the magical effects burn away when she caramelized it, but it tasted like a mixture of vomit and soap. A quick death at the hands of soul-eating spear was a mercy, compared to that.

Unfortunately, I kept just wounding ponies, and then they’d hang around groaning and moaning and complaining about their magic being gone, and little Sweetie Belle kept dodging. I tried pleading with her, “Just hold still! It’ll hurt a lot more if I don’t get you right in the heart!”

Then Princess Luna walked in, and I was a bit torn – after all, she was a Princess of Equestria, and Celestia would be really sad if she got killed, but on the other hoof, a Princess tasting the ruined cupcakes would seal Pinkie’s fate as a baker. “Um…” I said, wavering.

“Lyra?” she asked, looking around at the wounded and bleeding ponies.

“Look, I can explain,” I said. “I should probably stab you first though, just to be safe.”

She gave a little half-smile. “My apologies, but I did not come here to be stabbed. I need you to give me back my spear.”

I clutched Cutie Breaker close. “What? Already?”

She nodded. “Is this a problem?”

YES! Stab her! came the voices in my head. “Well, it’s your spear,” I said, ignoring them. I clutched it in the crook of one hoof and held it out to her. She took hold of it in her magic, and holstered it at her side. “I’m not sure how I’m supposed to stab you now, though,” I said, looking around for something to use as a weapon.

“I would prefer you did not,” she said, turning and leaving the building. I followed her out onto the street, which was dark and covered with fog. She glanced back at me, and spread her wings, taking to the air. “Our business is concluded here. Cease thy pursuit!”

“But it’s my job! I have to stab everypony!” I cried, leaping into the air after her.

I chased her around for a while, through the starlit clouds, but I was never any match for the Princess. Eventually, she tired of the game, and pulled a weird maneuver with her wings that sort of pushed me aside as she swung around and bucked me right in the ribs. I couldn’t breathe, and my left wing was paralyzed, and I slammed into the ground with a spine-tingling smack.

She reached down a hoof to help me up, and I realized we were standing in the practice yard, back in Canterlot. Which made no sense since we’d just been in Ponyville. “Oh,” I said. “This is a dream, isn’t it.” I let out a sigh of relief. “I’m so glad I don’t have to try to explain why I stabbed all those ponies.”

“You confuse me,” Princess Luna said. “You act as if you are unaffected by the violence around you, and yet last night you were in tears, presumably over the deaths which you had been a party to.”

“Yeah, it just sort of hit me,” I said, sitting down on the cold ground. “When I kill… I don’t feel anything, but I still want to be a good pony.” I looked up at her. “You’re a good pony, right? I need to be able to trust that you’re asking me to do the right thing.”

“And you believe that I erred,” Luna said, frowning.

“You said that the puppies were irrelevant, but that doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Diamond dogs are people – either they deserve to die, because they’ve done horrible things, or they’re going to do horrible things, or something like that, or else they deserve to live. You don’t just decide whether to kill them or not based on whether it’s convenient.”

Luna sighed. “I meant only that they were irrelevant to the point I was making at the time, related to your fighting skill.” I nodded, then tilted my head, when she looked likely to leave it at that. Luna grimaced, and continued. “In truth, I did not anticipate their presence. I would not have ordered their deaths, but it was likely that they would have grown up to menace ponies, just like their parents. They were old enough to remember, and to seek revenge.”

“But that would have been our fault,” I said. “It wouldn’t have been because they were bad people, it would have been because we broke them. It wouldn’t be fair to kill them because they were likely to come after us because we killed their parents. It would make more sense to kill ourselves.”

“Things are simpler with them dead,” Luna said. “I find it difficult to regret their absence.”

“But it was wrong,” I said, tapping my hoof on the ground. “They didn’t deserve to die.”

“What do you want me to say?” Luna asked, lightning flashing from the clouds gathering behind her.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something clever, that I haven’t thought of. Otherwise I’d just say it to myself.”

Luna paused, looming there in the darkness, and then lowered her head to stare me in the eyes. In a solemn voice, she intoned, “Perhaps it was meant to be. Nothing happens without a reason.”

I gave her a dubious look. “That’s not ‘clever’, just ‘vague’.”

Luna scowled. “You may be thinking of my sister. She would know what to say. I only know what must be done.” She started pacing back and forth, her hooves clattering on the rocky ground. “I ordered the deaths of everyone in the cave because I did not anticipate a raiding party bringing along their families. Pipsqueak killed them because he thought that their deaths would please me. At its heart, it was an accident, and the reason that they were in harm’s way was their parents’ decision to hunt, murder, and devour my little ponies!”

“So… blame the dead?” I said, smiling a little. “I suppose they’re not likely to argue about it.”

===

In the afternoon, when we woke up, everypony’s weapons and armor were gone. We were all still bat ponies, of course – the spell ended when we died, not when we took off the armor – but this was only the second time we’d been allowed to go to bed without getting killed, and the first time we’d gone to sleep in our armor. So I think this was the first time I saw any bat pony out of uniform. It was certainly the first time that I noticed we still had our cutie marks.

Although that made perfect sense, since they’re a magical effect that follows your spirit and mind, and not just patches of colored fur that would be a part of your body.

“So… did Luna come in here during the night, and strip us naked?” I asked.

“She stripped you naked,” Diamond Tiara replied. “The rest of us who didn’t throw a hissy fit were able to undress ourselves.”

“It wasn’t a hissy fit!” I protested. “I was crying, not hissing. I think that makes it a ‘crying jag’, although I’m not sure what ‘jag’ is supposed to mean other than ‘fit’.”

DeeTee just stared at me. “That’s still just as embarrassing, so I don’t know why you’re even bothering to argue.”

“I know!” Pipsqueak said. “It’s like you don’t know the first thing about schoolyard squabbles.”

“I went to a private school for unicorns. We fought magic duels,” I explained. “They were a lot of fun! I think they were supposed to be humiliating when you lost, but I’ve never gotten the hang of being humiliated. Attention is still attention, right?”

“That explains so much,” she said, sneering at me.

“Oh good! Somepony gets it!” I hugged her. “You’re my new best friend. Come on, give me a kiss!”

“I call next!” Pipsqueak said, while DeeTee struggled, with a look of disgust on her face, and eventally managed to shove my face to the side and squirm free. I rubbed the spot where her hoof had planted itself in my cheek, and noticed Pipsqueak waiting there, expectantly.

I took a step towards him, and nuzzled his cheek. He gasped, and his tiny little bat tail raised and curled behind him, his wings fluttering a bit, all excited. I nipped his cheek, running my fangs through his fur… letting my long snakey tongue slither out of my mouth and tickle at his ears. At his gasp, I lowered my muzzle to nibble beneath his cheek. He raised his head, and lifted a hoof to stroke my shoulder.

And then I sank my fangs into his throat, with a crunch as they quickly sliced through the meat and lodged against his windpipe. He jerked back instinctively, doing a good job of slicing up the soft flesh of his throat against my fangs, but I lunged and bit again, this time getting a good grip on something solid, and squeezing until I felt it give between my teeth. Blood was everywhere, spurting across my face and pouring down both our chests and forelegs, and as he struggled I lost my balance and we both went down.

There was a burst of flame, and after coughing up a few stray pieces of ash, I was clean. Pip reformed across the room, looking a bit shocked. I looked up at him, and licked my lips. “Was it good for you?” I asked.

“Are you out of your mind?” he asked.

I stalked across the room towards him, fluttering to land on top of a bed, and then hop from bed to bed to couch to table as I followed him from the ‘barracks’ half of the room to the ‘lounge’ part. “Do you want to go again?”

He kept backing up, until he was up against the row of blacked-out windows. “I mean, are you literally insane? Lyra, stop!”

I stopped, freezing in place with my mouth open, fangs showing as part of a snarl… it would have been a bit scarier if he’d waited until I was actually close, but on the other hoof he did look pretty scared.

“Lyra, go!” came a voice. It was a bat pony’s voice and I wasn’t looking to see who said it, but it doesn’t sound like the kind of thing Bon Bon would have said, so I’m guessing it was Diamond Tiara. At any rate, I lunged at Pip and he squealed and closed his eyes and flailed adorably at me with his little pony hooves.

I did mention that the bat pony bodies were ridiculously strong and fast, right? I pinned him down easily, and started licking his neck which for some reason he’d exposed to me when he twisted his head aside so as not to have to look at me.

And then he pissed all over me, which kind of ruined the mood.

Another Kind of Duty

Normally, afternoons were our time off, but then normally we weren’t still in bat form. And normally, we didn’t get ambushed by a drill sergeant as soon as we stepped out the barracks.

He was one of the largest unicorns I’d ever seen – seriously, he could give Celestia a run for her money. Part of that might have been the voice. “There you maggots are! Do you think just because you’re a bunch of bats you get to sleep all day?”

“Yeah?” Diamond Tiara said, sneering. “We stay up all night, so we sleep during the day. I thought that would be obvious.”

“Ooooh, we have a smart mouth. Do any of the rest of you girls have smart mouths?”

“I do!” I said, bouncing a bit. “Do you want me to sing you a song?”

“I want you to get down and give me twenty!” he shouted, right in my face.

“Twenty whats?”

It turned out to be ‘twenty wing-ups’, and since I ‘needed somepony to show me how to do a proper wing-up’ I had to do them with him standing on my back. I did sing him a little song while I was doing it, though, since he hadn’t said ‘no’. Well, I kind of hummed it. I hadn’t worked out words for it yet.

I was up to thirty three (he added twenty more to my count after Diamond Tiara rolled her eyes at him) by the time he noticed Pipsqueak not being a bat. “And what in Luna’s name are you supposed to be?”

“I’m supposed to be a bat, sir,” he replied, saluting.

That sort of stopped him in his tracks.

He didn’t ask for the details, and we didn’t give them to him. It’s not like I thought it was really a secret, but DeeTee and Bonnie and Pip were all making like it was a secret, so I figured the least I could do was play along. It didn’t really matter once we got to the actual hoof-to-hoof training that Luna had called him in for.

He was pretty good – I mean, he was a really good fighter, but he was a pretty good teacher, too. He’d actually tell us what we were doing wrong and how to figure out how to do it right, unlike Luna who’d usually let us get killed when we screwed up, hoping the pain would convince us to try harder next time.

That never really worked with us. Diamond Tiara would fail harder out of spite, Bon Bon would stubbornly keep trying the same thing over and over in case it would eventually start working, Pipsqueak would panic at the thought of failing his favorite princess and start just doing random stuff, and I’d get discouraged and start fighting really half-assed while daydreaming about music or something, and just resign myself to dying some more.

But this guy was good. Even Diamond Tiara eventually started listening.

Unfortunately, he was a Royal Guard with all that implied, in particular the bit where he was awake during the day and slept at night. So when the sun went down, he hoofed us back over to Luna.

None of us said anything, as she paced back and forth in front of us, but I know I’m terrible at hiding my own body language, so I think she probably got the gist of it. We were not ready for another night of training directly after a day of it.

“Take heart,” she said to us. “Tonight I have something special planned.”

“Another mission?” Pipsqueak asked.

“Nay, thou art not yet prepared. This is clear to me now. Tonight, I must attend an event recommended by my sister. You four shall escort me. Diamond Tiara – as we agreed, you may attend in your true form, in order to better curry favor with the nobles and other wealthy ponies in attendance. The rest of you will be my honor guard.”

“Actually,” I said, having a sudden thought. “Could I come in my real form too? I know I didn’t make it a condition, but I’m planning to be famous someday, and anything I can do to get my name out there is another step on the path to fame and stuff.”

Diamond Tiara scowled. “Do you even know how to act at a fancy party?”

“Yeah, I grew up on ‘em,” I said. “They’re boring, but I can play the up and coming eccentric in my sleep. It’s one of the standard forms. Number twelve.”

“What?” Luna asked.

I peered at Luna. “You’ll be doing a number seven, I assume? The grumpy soldier?”

“I do not recognize that notation,” Luna replied. “I rarely attend such parties. I was given to understand that one must be oneself, in order to be accepted for what one truly is.”

I giggled. “Well, sure! But you have to be a specific version of yourself that telegraphs who you truly are correctly. Back when I was in school, we came up with a list of archetypes.

“One is The Dignified Gentlemare – this is the default, that everypony is supposed to emulate. You don’t draw a lot of attention, you leave a generally positive impression on everypony, and you bore yourself and everypony else to tears with the sheer conventionality.

“Two is the Naïve Waif. It’s an excuse if you don’t actually know what you’re doing, but usually it’s a cover for somepony who doesn’t really feel confident and wants to fish for compliments. Not a good one to use if you want to actually accomplish anything.

“Three is the Rakish Ne’er-do-well. Generally, stallions on the prowl. Lots of bragging about silly things they did recently, they usually gather a crowd to listen to their stories.

“Four is the Kindly Matron, which is mostly an excuse to look down on everypony else for being less boring than you are. I can’t stand people who use that form.

“Five is the Shining Wit. You make all sorts of puns and act ever-so-clever, and if you fail to pull it off you look like a total idiot. Either way, people will be laughing at you.

“Six is the Princess. Just pretend you’re Princess Celestia. Demand respect from everypony, and stay totally cool no matter what.

“Seven is the Grumpy Soldier. You’re friendly to everypony but you’re looking down on them at the same time, because you’re involved in things that are so much more important than all this frippery. Anypony who complains about anything gets the Death Glare. You don’t say anything, you just let them realize that you know what real pain is.

“Eight is –“

“Enough,” Luna said, cutting me off with a sweep of her wing. “Your credentials are accepted, you may play the part of one of my attendants. Pipsqueak, Candy Pony, the two of you will be our guards.”

Bon Bon shrugged. Pipsqueak saluted.

To change us back into our real bodies, we apparently had to die, so Luna had us give a quick demonstration of everything we’d learned during the day’s practice. Pip and Bonnie got force fields, and armor, and their choice of weapons. Diamond Tiara and I got completely slaughtered. They double-teamed her and took her out quickly, slashing open her belly with a wingblade, then left her there screaming and bleeding out while Bon Bon pinned me to the ground and Pipsqueak stabbed me right in the crotch like he was trying to rape me to death with his spear.

He was probably just trying to make it extra-painful. And it was! My muscles convulsed around the razor-sharp leaf blade, slicing up everything between my legs, and then it was inside me cutting up my vital organs. My stomach burst open, bathing my innards in acid, and it lodged in my liver, and Pip sort of held it there, wiggling it around instead of pushing another half a foot and getting my heart. It got him bucked in the face a bunch of times, but with Luna’s force field he barely noticed, and meanwhile I was in agony, writhing uncontrollably and gushing blood from the ragged entry wound.

Really, it sounds worse than it was. If I have to die in excruciating pain, I want Bonnie or somepony else I love holding me tight. Yes, she was choking me to death with spiked hooves digging into my neck, but that was actually sort of a bonus – it made me go all fuzzy even before I finally died.

And after everything went black… well, there’s a reason that letting us get killed when we lose never really inspired me to work harder to avoid it. I came so hard when I reappeared in the barracks! Diamond Tiara had actually managed to finish dying first, so she was there watching me, and I was so turned on that I didn’t actually mind. She could have jumped me right there, and I would have let her.

She didn’t, of course. She hated me as much as I hated her. We did shower together, but that was only because there was just the one big shower, and we scrubbed ourselves quietly in different corners of it until we felt like normal, living ponies again.

===

Despite what I said to Luna, I really do love fancy parties. All the elements of a truly tedious travesty are there – plates of little snack foods, slow music that hardly anypony recognizes or understands, and fancy dresses that are all expensive and fragile so that nopony wants to move around too quickly. But then you counteract that by pushing the quality of everything up to eleven, and it’s like stepping into a whole other world.

The dresses Luna made for us helped. I know, I know, magically created dresses are a huge no-no, but as a Princess of Equestria Luna is allowed to change the rules if she wants, and changing them so that Diamond Tiara seemed to be wearing a living galaxy of glimmering stars, that left the impression that you should be able to see through the starscape to the pony below, while not actually letting you see anything past the glare that got more intense the closer you looked – well, that didn’t exactly cost her points.

My dress wasn’t quite as breathtaking; she’d offset my mint-colored coat and mane with a dark, gaseous nebula, that sort of squirmed around against my body instead of lying like cloth. Like Tiara’s, it had a large cat’s-eye gem for a brooch, identical to the ones on the armor, just in case we needed to suddenly be bats.

Luna herself went naked, except for her regalia. And us, I suppose – as her entourage, we were there to make her look good.

The party wasn’t in Canterlot per se, so that meant a long, cold chariot-ride in Luna’s horror-themed monstrosity of a carriage, with Pipsqueak and Bon Bon pulling it. And when I say ‘cold’, I mean that I was actually envying the bat ponies pulling us, since the exercise was keeping them warm. I was even tempted to snuggle up to Luna for warmth, but her expression was even colder than the air.

“So, what’s this party for, anyway?” I asked, to distract myself. “Is it Lord Such and Such’s birthday?”

“Nay, it is a celebration of astronomers, who have constructed yet another monstrous telescope to better look at the stars from afar,” Luna replied.

“Oh! So they’re basically holding the party in your honor?” Diamond Tiara said.

“So they think,” Luna replied. “To tell the truth, I care little for astronomy.”

“I thought you wanted ponies to stay up all night, staring at the stars?” I asked.

“They’re a bunch of nerds,” Diamond Tiara replied. “Nopony wants to hang out with nerds.”

“I find certain nerds to be tolerable,” Luna said. “Astronomers, however, should all be consumed in an entirely accidental, tragic, and yet somehow inescapable fire.”

“Ah,” I said, smiling. “So we are on a mission.”

“No!” Luna snapped. “No. They are annoying foals, not villains or monsters. You are not to kill any of them.” She paused. “Unless you discover who came up with form 228-B. Nay, nay, not even then.” She sighed. “They are not bad ponies. I must remind myself of this. They grew up in a world where the stars were fixed, and spent their entire lives recording and mapping that fixed pattern.”

“Oh,” I said. “I get it. You used to move the stars around, before your exile.”

“Indeed, I painted a new pattern every night,” Luna said. “Most of them were not this… haphazard botchery. When I painted my last sky, I was not entirely in my right mind.”

“So it’s sort of like Nightmare Night. It’s an insult and a reminder of the bad parts of the past, but to everypony mortal it’s just the way it’s always been.”

“But you’re a Princess,” Diamond Tiara said. “If you want to change the sky, do it.”

“I would,” Luna replied. “However, doing so without making an eternal enemy of the Canterlot Astronomy Society requires me to fill out form 228-B.” She paused for dramatic effect. “For each star.”

“Hire some ponies,” Diamond Tiara said. “Have them fill out the forms for you. It’s tedious and awful, but it probably doesn’t require any actual skill, especially if you don’t care if the forms are accurate, so you can use unskilled labor, which is dirt cheap.”

Luna stared at her. She smirked.

“They obviously invented the form to keep you from changing the sky. They knew you wouldn’t want to just break the rules, since you’re sensitive about being seen as a tyrant, so they threw a bunch of red tape in your face. But they screwed up – they made it possible to play their game, just really annoying. If you actually move the stars, they’ll be more than annoyed. They’ll be crushed. They spent their entire lives studying the current patterns and orbits – you’ll completely destroy their careers.”

“Just don’t move the north star,” I said. “That one’s actually used by sailors.”

“No, no, you should move that one too,” Diamond Tiara said. “You should move it to make it more useful to sailors, just to rub it in their faces.”

“I will have to think on this,” Luna replied. “For tonight, the plan is to pretend to be pleased at their attention. Nopony is to kill anypony. Even if we see somepony who sorely deserves it, we will be in public, and should leave their fate to the Royal Guard.”

“So, the Night Guard is a secret?” I asked.

“Nay, but the details of our missions should remain so.”

With that, Luna fell silent, and the cold started creeping in on me again. Fortunately, it was only a few more minutes before we began our final descent, and once we were down below cloud level it started to warm up.

The moral of the story is that if you’re going to go flying in a pegasus-pulled chariot, wear clothing made of actual, physical cloth and not illusionary nebula clouds.

Talk of the Town

When Luna made her entrance, she was certainly the center of attention. All the stares, and whispers – Diamond Tiara was eating it right up. I was doing my best to pretend to. Luna looked like she’d set herself against a dragon’s flame and was enduring the blast stoically.

“I hope I haven’t missed the dedication,” she said, as she entered the party proper, which looked even more subdued than expected. The ponies that normally would have been standing around in easy conversation groups were huddled together in bunches all over the room.

“Who cares about the dedication?” said a loud, bitter-looking old soldier. “Haven’t you heard? Tirek is on the loose!”

For a second, Luna’s ears perked up, and she almost smiled. But instead, she remained skeptical. “That is not possible. My sister and I placed wards upon Tartarus to alert us of any further escapes, and they have not been triggered.”

“Are you talking about the magic flu?” I suggested. “I know it looks superficially like Tirek’s drain, but it’s been going on for months in Ponyville, and the ponies that catch it always recover. It’s nothing like what Tirek did to us all last time he was out.”

That just made ponies whisper more, but the soldier shook his head as he approached, to be able to talk in a more normal voice. “We’re talking about a tribe of Diamond Dogs who were found brutally murdered, down to the last puppy. They wouldn’t have been missed – the Guard was planning to evict them anyway, since they’d been threatening to devour ponies –“

“More than threatening, if this is the tribe I believe you’re referring to,” Luna replied.

The soldier nodded. “So we thought, yes. As I said, they wouldn’t have been missed. But when the Guard found them dead, they ran a magical analysis on the bodies, and found that all of them had been drained of their magic before their demise.”

“Oops,” I squeaked.

The soldier nodded at me. “Indeed. Tirek failed to cover his tracks, and now we know he’s out there. If he’s attacking entire tribes, he’s already built up some strength, but –“

“Maybe it was some other magic-draining monster?” I suggested. “A magic vampire bat, or something?”

“Or maybe it’s a masked vigilante, like the Power Ponies,” Diamond Tiara said. “She hasn’t attacked anyone who didn’t deserve it, right?”

The soldier just gave us a look. The look. The Death Glare.

Luna met his gaze, and matched him glare for glare. “I assure you, if any dangerous creature haunts the night, we will ensure that it is dealt with appropriately. Even if it is Tirek returned yet again.”

“Of course, Princess Luna. Your eternal vigilance is legendary,” he replied, turning away with a small smile. “Enjoy the party.”

We did our best! The food was actually quite good, and while most of the attendees were basically nerds, I know how to talk to nerds. I mostly talked about the magic flu, and what made it different than Tirek’s assault, and tried to get them to talk about other magic-draining effects that might be responsible for the Diamond Dogs, since I didn’t want to come right out and say ‘what about that magic-draining spear that Luna apparently has as a keepsake from Tirek’s first attack’? Which was probably a good choice, since none of them seemed to know about it.

I didn’t get much singing done, although I did start playing a minor-keyed suspense theme every time someone started to talk about Tirek. Most of the time they didn’t even notice me doing it, even when they were timing their doom-filled rant to the beat. It was hilarious.

I caught a little bit of Luna tormenting the astronomers. They’d pointed the new telescope at one of the stars, and were showing her the view through the eyepiece. “Ah, the Calf,” Luna said.

“No no, Caph,” a very blue unicorn corrected her. “It’s a Saddle Arabian word meaning –“

“Hmm, no. I’m pretty sure I named this one after a calf,” Luna said, interrupting him. “She was taken by griffon raiders, and her mother was so sad, so I made a star for her to look up into the sky, and remember her lost child. I started writing the names of all the lost children on its surface, once it was obvious that predation was to be a regular part of life. If you’d like, I could bring it closer.”

The unicorn stared at her. “Really?”

Luna continued, with a perfect deadpan expression, “It’s roughly the size of this house, and made out of nickel, so I’d need somewhere to put it where no pony would be crushed.”

He started to stammer. “Ah… this isn’t my estate…”

Luna shook her head. “Probably for the best. Falling stars are said to grant wishes, after all, and we have an unknown creature on the loose. Who knows what she might wish for?”

Just then, there was an ear-piercing shriek. Everypony turned to look at Bon Bon (I hadn’t been keeping track of which bat pony was which, but I recognized the shriek) as she pointed at a random unicorn in the middle of the crowd. “Princess, it’s a changeling assassin! Get to safety!”

Everypony backed away from hapless mare, as Luna frowned in her general direction, and Pipsqueak leapt on her, pinning her to the ground.

“Dearest,” I said to Bon Bon in a quiet voice, as I snuck up next to her, “What exactly makes you think that Moondancer is a changeling assassin?”

“Because Moondancer is dead,” Bon Bon hissed. “When we were fighting those diamond dogs? Her cutie mark was on one of the cook’s aprons.”

“Really?” I blinked. “And I didn’t notice? I would have noticed that, she’s a friend.”

“Wait, you didn’t notice?” Bon Bon asked. “I thought that way why you helped kill those puppies.”

“That was an accident! I was just holding the spear and –“

“And it doesn’t matter, because she’s dead, and this thing is taking her place,” Bon Bon sneered in a louder voice, advancing on the struggling pile where Pipsqueak was trying to hold Moondancer to the floor while she kicked him in the face. He didn’t have one of Luna’s force fields, so it probably hurt.

“Okay, look, I don’t think a changeling would put up that much of a fight,” I said, watching her knock loose one of Pipsqueak’s fangs. “Why don’t we talk to her and get to the bottom of this?”

“Indeed,” Luna said, lighting her horn and lifting the two combatants into the air. “Let us retire to a private chamber, and speak of this like civilized ponies. Even a changeling, if that is what she is, can be reasoned with.”

“I’m not a changeling!”

“If you are not a changeling, then you are a pony, and can most definitely be reasoned with,” Luna replied. “Let us go, and talk.”

===

Like any fancy mansion, the Such-and-Such estate had a million little rooms for ponies to sneak off into and have sex. Or play billiards or whatever. Luna picked one of the billiards rooms, although the table obviously hadn’t been used for billiards in a while, since it had enough dust on the dust cover to build a dust fort and re-enact the battle of Canterlot with dust bunnies.

As soon as the door closed behind us, Luna blasted Moondancer with an anti-changeling spell. She staggered, but nothing happened. “I told you, I’m not a changeling!” she said.

“My guard claims that she saw your corpse,” Luna replied. “Please explain why you yet live.”

“I was rescued,” Moondancer said, walking around behind the table, to keep it as a barrier between her and the princess. Bon Bon and Pipsqueak started to circle to either side, but Luna motioned them back. Diamond Tiara, in case you were wondering, was nowhere to be seen – whatever she’d been involved in must have been more important than a potential assassin.

I think she was in one of the little side rooms having sex. I never actually found out for sure.

“From the Diamond Dogs?” I prompted.

“Yes. The Royal Guard found me and the others, in the cage they’d been keeping us in.” She looked uncertain.

“Do you remember being eaten by Diamond Dogs?” I asked. “Or do you remember being kept in a cage for several days?”

“I – I must have been unconscious,” Moondancer said, looking pretty shaken. “Oh Celestia, what if I am a changeling? Would I know?”

I smiled, and let my lyre play some calming music. “Please, just tell us what you remember. I think I know what might have happened, but I’d like to hear your story before I poison your mind with my theories.”

Moondancer nodded. “Okay, Miss Heartstrings.” she said. “As you know, I’m in service to Princess Celestia. I’m not in the guard, but sometimes she has missions for which the guard is not suitable. In this case, to make diplomatic overtures to a tribe of Diamond Dogs suspected of murdering and eating ponies. I was given a flag of truce and sent to negotiate an end to the hostilities. I approached during the day, without an escort so as to appear nonthreatening.”

“Foolish,” Luna said. “Diamond Dogs respect only strength.”

“Yes. I thought that by appearing without an escort, I could project an aura of confidence that would allow them to take me seriously,” Moondancer replied. “I thought that my magic could protect me if they instead became hostile, and that a demonstration that they could not hurt me would put me in a superior negotiating position.”

“But they burst out of the ground and grabbed you before you could react?” Bon Bon asked.

Moondancer winced. “I never saw them,” she said. “There was just this pain – this horrible pain in my stomach, and then I felt so weak. I looked down, and all my… all my insides…” She closed her eyes. “And then there was something at my throat, tearing at my throat, and it hurt so much, and the next thing I remember… I was in the cage. Unharmed.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That sounds like Celestia’s spell.”

“Are you saying my sister brought these ponies back from the dead?” Luna asked.

“No. Ew. Of course not,” I said. Necromancy isn’t forbidden, precisely, but the ponies it brings back aren’t actually the ponies that died, and they usually know it, and go crazy, and rampage all over hurting people and destroying property. “The spell makes it so that they never died in the first place. Except that you remember what actually happened before it goes back and changes the past. Like, I remember falling hundreds of feet onto a bunch of sharp pointy crystals, and bleeding out with four broken legs while staring into Twinkleshine’s dead eyes as her splattered brains gradually congealed, even though what actually happened was that we survived the fall with only minor injuries and found our way out of the caves just in time for the reception.”

“So I’m not a changeling,” Moondancer said.

“No, you’re fine,” I said, smiling. “Although Twilight Sparkle will want to ritually murder you if you ever go to Ponyville.”

After that, I took Moondancer into one of the little side rooms to catch up, while Luna and her guards returned to the party. No, we didn’t have sex – we just cuddled while she talked about death and her future career prospects, since she wasn’t sure if she could keep on putting herself in harm’s way like that.

I may have offered her a position in Luna’s Night Guard, but if I did then she turned me down cold, since dying repeatedly during training was not on her list of life goals. So I’m going to pretend that that didn’t happen, and it was all Bon Bon’s fault that the rumor mill started blaming us for the slaughter of relatively innocent Diamond Dogs, who after all hadn’t really murdered a dozen ponies and made clothing out of their skin.

===

After the party, I wrote a letter to Twilight Sparkle, telling her that there were another dozen or so ponies that needed to be ritually murdered to clear up the timestream, and about the shadow transmutation we were using to let us fight monsters safely, and about Cutie Breaker since I didn’t think Luna would mind her knowing. I was just finishing up when Pipsqueak, naked but still in his bat-pony form, entered the room and clip-clopped over to my bunk.

“Um… I just wanted to apologize for…”

“Murdering a bunch of innocent puppies?” I suggested.

Pip shook his head. “No, for – wait, you’re still on that? Luna said that it was a reasonable interpretation of her orders.”

“And what if they’d been ponies?” I asked.

“That would be different,” Pipsqueak said.

“They might have been ponies,” I continued. “The spell was waiting until it was safe to bring them back. Once the adults were all dead, it should have been safe. But they didn’t come back until after we’d left.”

“I wouldn’t have killed pony prisoners!”

“I’m sure that’s what you’re telling yourself, but our orders were clear,” I said, poking him in the chest. “Nothing. But. Corpses.” I poked him again for each word.

Pipsqueak took a deep breath, then shook his head. “No. My loyalty has limits.”

“I don’t think Celestia’s spell trusts you on that,” I said.

There was a rustle of fur and flesh, and Bon Bon appeared in the lounge. She groaned, and got to her feet, then frowned at Pipsqueak. “What’s wrong? Do you need some help offing him?”

“What, I’m supposed to kill him now?” I asked.

“However you want, and he’s not allowed to fight back. Luna thought he was being excessively cruel when he impaled you earlier, so you get to have your revenge,” she explained.

I’m not really a very vengeful pony, and I hadn’t really minded him being all brutal and vicious. On the other hoof, he was kind of annoying.

On the last two hooves, we were in a castle suspended over a several-thousand-foot drop, and we hadn’t ever really gotten to take advantage of that. So I had Bon Bon and Diamond Tiara help. We dislocated his wings, slashed the membranes just to be sure, and then dragged him up into one of the towers with a balcony overlooking the forest below, and tossed him over the side. I wanted to jump down after him, just to see the look on his face, but Bon Bon pointed out that I didn’t have wings or a shadow transmutation, and that she wouldn’t be surprised if dying by jumping off the side of the castle was actually my destiny.

So I didn’t actually get to see much – it was night, and we weren’t bats, so we couldn’t really make out what happened when he hit. When we got back to the barracks, Pipsqueak said it was actually kind of a fun ride, and the sudden stop killed him so fast it didn’t have time to hurt, so it sort of double-backfired.

This is why I’m not a vengeful pony – I really suck at revenge.

Bar Hopping

It was a few more days before anything else interesting happened, and that was just Spike coming back. Luna had a suit of armor for him, that was supposed to turn him into a bat-pony, but it ended up turning him into a sort of pony-dragon hybrid, which utterly baffled her. It wasn’t the sort of thing that was supposed to be able to happen – it was like adding two plus two and getting ‘fish’.

“The important thing is that he’ll come back after being killed, right?” I said.

“Will he?” Luna asked. “If he does, in what form? This is not possible, but if it has, indeed, occurred, then everything else we know about the shadow transformation is in doubt!”

“Well, we might as well test it,” Diamond Tiara said. “He has to die sooner or later, unless he wants to be stuck as that weird half-thing forever.”

“What?” Spike said, looking up from where he’d been fascinated, examining his new wings.

“And if we’re wrong, it kills him, and then Twilight kills us,” I said. “Are you really willing to take that risk?”

She rolled her eyes. “If it kills him, he’ll be saved by that stupid spell you were going on about after the party.”

“He’s not a pony,” I said. “Celestia’s spell only works on ponies.”

“I’m voting for not being killed, if it’s all the same to you girls?” Spike said, raising a clawed hoof.

“We must study this properly, and figure out what exactly went wrong before we risk Spike dying,” Luna replied. “Even if I cared nought for his life, what has happened is beyond my understanding, so the further effects should more of the spell be invoked are likewise impossible to predict. Killing him could return him safely to his normal form, or annihilate the world in a sea of fire.”

Spike pouted. “You’re going to hook me up to one of those machines like Twilight has, aren’t you.”

“An excellent suggestion! Let us start with that,” Luna replied. “The rest of you have the night off. Try not to kill anypony.”

===

It was a Twosday, which meant that the drill sergeant guy was spending the night in the barracks, since he was teaching us on Twosdays and Windsdays. By popular acclaim – which meant, Diamond Tiara suggested it, and we decided to go along because even if we hated her (and I’m the only one who really hated her) she knew enough not to make suggestions that ponies weren’t going to follow – we decided to go find him and ask him what Guards did when they had time off.

In his case, the answer was ‘Play Obliettes and Ogres’, and even if we’d been interested in that, his group wasn’t going to be able to make room for four newcomers in one night. He pointed us to the bars that he figured we were probably asking about, so we headed there, and got drunk with a bunch of Royal Guards.

They were mostly out of uniform, which meant they were all the colors of the rainbow, but they didn’t seem to mind that we were still in our armor, and being bat ponies was ‘exotic’. Especially since we were bat pony mares, and even out from under their armor’s illusions most of the Royal Guard were stallions.

Yeah, Pipsqueak’s bat pony form was a mare. I mentioned they were all identical, right? He was still *such* a colt even when he was in it, though.

Anyway, DeeTee and Pip managed to get drunk enough that Bonnie and I didn’t let them go home with the nice stallions that they were draping themselves all over – and the stallions were actually nice, and understood perfectly. Especially when we told them that Pipsqueak was really a colt. Instead, we stayed at the bar and did some karaoke, and some table-dancing because why not? We might not have gotten all the words of the songs exactly right, especially when we were dancing on the tables.

And that’s why they call them the diamond dogs
‘cause they die and they die and they hop like frogs
when you stab ‘em in the butt with a big sharp spear…
There’s really nothing to fear!

Eventually, we staggered out the wrong door and found a changeling feeding on one of the Guards in a back alley.

Yeah, the invasion of Canterlot was years ago, but changelings are like insects. You just can’t get rid of them, but it’s usually pretty harmless to let them stick around, since the worst that happens is that you lose a little love and wake up covered in itchy bites. So we let it finish with the Guard before dragging it off to the next bar. It turned into yet another identical bat pony, and we had a new game to play with the Guards there. “One of us is a colt, and one of us is a changeling. How do you like those odds?”

It ended up coming back to the barracks with us, and spent the night with Pipsqueak. When we woke up in the afternoon, it was trying to make itself useful as some sort of domestic servant – cleaning up all the junk we’d left lying around, making the extra beds, things like that – but Luna wasn’t having any of that.

She dragged it out to the training ground. We were all squinting in the bright daylight – it was overcast, at least, but still way too bright for bat eyes. The changeling was fine, since it could just adjust its eyes to whatever light level it wanted. Stupid cheating changelings.

“I will not have my Night Guard taking on servants,” Luna told it. “They are my servants, and if you wish to join them, it will be as an equal. But if that is to happen, you must prove yourself worthy. Pick one of them,” she motioned to us, “and kill them, in my name.”

“What?” the changeling chittered. “No!”

“It’s okay,” I said, stepping forward. “You can kill me. I don’t mind.”

It stared at me.

“Luna has us die for her amusement all the time,” I tried to explain. “That might be a reason not to join, I guess…”

“It is not for my amusement, it is for your own edification,” Luna insisted. She turned to the changeling. “But she speaks the truth – if you join my Night Guard, you will die in my service.”

There was a flash of green fire, and the changeling was suddenly an ordinary pegasus, fleeing in terror.

“Well, I guess not everypony’s cut out for this,” I said. “I wouldn’t expect a changeling to be so squeamish, though.”

Bon Bon had her hoof up on her forehead. “You forgot to mention the part where we come back to life after we die.”

“What? No, I’m sure I mentioned that part,” I said, trying to remember exactly how I’d put it.

“You said Luna killed us all the time,” Diamond Tiara said, rolling her eyes. “I thought you were being coy on purpose.”

I pouted, and stomped the ground with a forehoof. “Oh, Luna’s tits. It would have been fun to have a changeling around.”

“The armor probably wouldn’t have worked properly on her anyway,” Pipsqueak said. “Did any of you get her name?”

===

We were halfway through our daytime training – it was a Windsday, so the drill sergeant stallion was there, taking up our free time with actual instruction – when the next shoe dropped on our heads from our night of debauchery. This time, it was Moondancer.

“Hi, Moonie!”

She looked grim, but nodded in my direction. “Miss Heartstrings. I’m afraid that this is not a social call.”

“Here to join the training?” the Guard asked her. “I’ve heard Celestia’s been sending you out as her envoy.”

She sighed. “I’m afraid that a certain matter has reached the public’s ear, and can no longer be ignored. Miss Heartstrings, Miss Sweetie Drops, Diamond Tiara, and Pipsqueak, by order of Princess Celestia, you are to come with me to stand trial for the slaughter of the Rocky Gulch Diamond Dog tribe.”

“You can’t do this!” Diamond Tiara snapped.

Moondancer lit her horn with a generic aura, although she wasn’t casting a spell yet. “If you will not go quietly –“

“No, I mean you have no legal right to do this,” Diamond Tiara continued, interrupting her. “We’re agents of Princess Luna. Princess Celestia has no jurisdiction.”

Moondancer narrowed her eyes. “When you… implied, in my presence, that you were responsible for the deaths, we were willing to overlook it. But you stood on a table last night in the Prancing Pony Tavern and sang a drunken song about your crimes in front of half the Guard. You can’t possibly expect this to go unpunished.”

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Pipsqueak said.

“Then you have nothing to fear if you stand before Celestia for judgment,” Moondancer replied. “Although I’m not sure how you expect to get away with killing noncombatants –“

“You mean, the ones wearing your hide as an apron?” Bon Bon asked. “I could still recognize your cutie mark, even under the splattered blood from the ponies she’d butchered after you.”

“She probably means the puppies,” I pointed out, helpfully. “But that was all Pip. You can just arrest Pipsqueak, right?”

“You helped,” Diamond Tiara said.

“Not on purpose!”

“Look,” said the sergeant. “Everypony calm down.” He was, of course, completely ignored.

“Nopony’s arresting me on any trumped up charges,” Pipsqueak said. “Anyone who tries is a traitor to the Princess, and the penalty for treason is death!”

“The law doesn’t work that way!” Moondancer shouted in his face.

“Are you seriously charging Princess Celestia with treason?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure the law doesn’t work that way.”

“No, no, I was just going to get rid of this zombie,” Pipsqueak said, motioning at Moondancer. “She’s not really alive anyway, so it’s not like I can kill her.”

There was a flash of purple light, and then the four of us were trapped under a giant dome shield, thanks to our drill sergeant. “Okay, everypony, calm down.”

“Thank you, Shining Armor,” Moondancer said. “Now if you’ll help me escort them to the palace dungeons –“

“That includes you, Moondancer,” the sergeant said, shaking his head. “I’m afraid they were correct when they said that it’s Luna’s prerogative to judge them for their actions done in her service. This isn’t the first time Celestia’s overstepped her bounds with the other Princesses, and while Twily and Cadance let her get away with it, I don’t think Princess Luna would be happy about this.”

“That’s why I’m doing this now, while she’s asleep,” Moondancer said. “This is for Luna’s benefit! Of course she wouldn’t throw her servants under the cart, but the public demands justice. If it’s not these idiots, it’s going to be Princess Luna herself who answers for these crimes.”

“I can guess how she’ll answer,” I said.

“She’d stick her tongue out and give a raspberry?” Bon Bon guessed.

“No, no, she’d glower at them, and her mane and tail would sort of swirl into that big ‘tornado of night’ thing,” I said. “And then she’d tell whoever was complaining to go buck themselves in the head.”

“And can’t you see what that would do to her reputation?” Moondancer asked.

“It would reinforce her current reputation as being a grumpy angry pony of the night?” I answered. “How about it, Pip? Want to take one for the team? They need somepony to blame, and you’re most at fault. It’ll make Luna look better.”

“No, we can’t give up anypony, not even Pipsqueak. It would set a terrible precedent,” Diamond Tiara said.

“As opposed to setting the precedent that you’re entirely above the law?” Moondancer asked.

“I can live with that,” Pipsqueak said. “The only law we need obey is that of Princess Luna.”

Moondancer didn’t give up that easily, but she didn’t have the magical oomph to get through the drill sergeant guy’s force field, and none of us were going to agree to go get railroaded into prison, so it was a standoff until Luna finally woke up and sent her packing.

“You know,” I said, “I don’t think Princess Celestia is going to drop this just like that. Maybe we should go somewhere else until this all blows over? There has to be somewhere else you can teach us.”

“If they came up to the Crystal Empire, I could put them through drills with the rest of the troops,” suggested the sergeant.

Luna snorted. “I will not be driven from my home by my sister’s machinations. I will deal with this matter, you need not worry about it any further.”

===

Obviously, that didn’t work. I was up all morning, shivering in bed, thinking about how close I’d come to spending the rest of my life in prison. “I don’t want to go to jail, Bon Bon,” I said, holding her. “Promise me that if they come to take me away to jail, you’ll kill me first. It has to be you! You’re the only one!”

“I think they’d catch on when you reappeared on the other side of the room,” Bon Bon said.

I whimpered. “Well – then you’d have to kill me twice! I don’t want to go to jail, it’s soooo boring! I’d rather be dead!”

“Ugh, will you shut up?” Diamond Tiara shouted from three bunks over. “Nopony’s going to jail. My family has lawyers, you know.”

“What does that matter? Celestia makes all the laws! For a case like this, she’d be the judge, too, and the executioner!” I was babbling, I think, but only because I was remembering some of the darker parts of my civics class. “All that the laws are are things that Celestia said in some previous case, that they wrote down just in case she wants to be consistent, later. But you can’t use them against her – she’ll just do whatever she wants and they’ll write it down as more laws in their little law books and your lawyers will have to go back to school and study the case of Lyra Heartstrings vs. Equestria. And meanwhile, I’d be stuck in prison with my horn cut off, having to pick up the soap with my mouth! Forever!”

“Were you even listening?” Diamond Tiara said. “Celestia doesn’t want to punish anypony. She just wants to look like she’s doing everything by the book so that ponies don’t form an angry torch-bearing mob and burn down the castle. The lawyers can come up with a technicality, and she’ll jump all over it. Go to sleep!”

“Only if you promise to kill me if it doesn’t work,” I said, pouting.

She had a counteroffer. “How about if I promise to kill you if you don’t stop whining?”

“I’ll kill you,” Pipsqueak said. “Anytime you want. Just give the word.”

I sniffled. “Okay.”

Everypony was quiet for about ten seconds.

“Wait, was that supposed to be the word?” Pipsqueak asked.

Diamond Tiara shrieked, and threw something at him, and then they got in some sort of pillow fight and probably ended up sleeping with each other or something. I wasn’t really paying attention. I was still picturing the inside of a prison cell, and at some point I fell asleep and started dreaming about it, and basically that whole morning really sucked.

===

We had the afternoon off, and Diamond Tiara decided to go see her family’s lawyers, just to make sure that she was really in the clear. The rest of us went with her, including Spike who was still stuck as a dragon-bat-pony-hybrid-thing, but was no longer stuck being a lab rat, since they’d figured it out.

“Yeah, it turns out the transformation worked fine,” he said. “If I died I’d turn back into a drake, just like you guys.”

“So what’s with the scales?” I asked. “Not that I’m complaining. It’s a really good look on you.”

“Luna said that being a dragon is like my cutie mark,” Spike said. “It’s a spiritual thing, and not just the body I was born into. So even if you turn me into a pony, I’m still a dragon. I can breathe fire and everything!”

“That’s so cool! Do you still eat meat?”

Spike gave me a look. “I’m not going to eat you, Lyra.”

“Oh come on! It’s the perfect opportunity,” I said.

“You wouldn’t enjoy it,” Spike said.

Diamond Tiara laughed. “You’d be surprised.”

“You might as well humor her,” Bon Bon said. “Luna’s been having us kill each other almost every night.”

“Yeah, about that,” Spike said. “Are you sure she’s… you know. Not evil?”

“Pretty sure,” I said. “Almost entirely sure! I think.”

“She’s a princess,” Diamond Tiara said. “The worst she could be is ‘eccentric’.”

“Right!” I said. “If she declared herself a queen, then we’d know she turned evil.”

“Riiight,” Spike said. “I suppose you know her better than I do.”

The Rich family lawyer – and since his name was ‘New Money’ he might actually have been part of the family – was happy to see Diamond Tiara, or at least he was trying his hardest to look happy to see her. He welcomed us all into his parlor, which had shelves and shelves of law books full of precedents Celestia or her other judges had set over the years, and a huge cabinet full of hard liquor, because being an expert on the passing whims of immortal princesses was enough to drive anypony to drink.

New Money and Diamond Tiara made small talk for about an hour while the rest of us sat around bored out of minds. Well, I wasn’t that bored, I was doing composition in my head, which is always kind of interesting, and New Money even had a notepad and quill so I could write some of it down.

But eventually, he got to the point. “So… you haven’t been arrested, have you? Or any of your friends?”

“Not quite,” Diamond Taira said, casually. “Princess Celestia sent an envoy to take us in, but Luna says she can make it go away. I’d like to know how our defense is looking in case it doesn’t go away as neatly as she’d like.”

“We were arrested last week,” I pointed out.

“That didn’t have anything to do with this, and you were already pardoned,” Diamond Tiara said.

“By Celestia, or by Luna?” New Money asked. He frowned when we told him Luna had done it.

“This could be a problem,” he said. “If she pardons you again for another crime, it’ll start to look like she’s abusing her power.”

“But it isn’t abuse if Celestia arrests us repeatedly on made up offenses?” Pipsqueak asked.

“But we’re actually guilty,” I said. “I mean, you are this time, and Bonnie and Spike and me were last time. I guess Diamond Tiara isn’t guilty of anything.”

New Money poured himself another drink. A very large drink. “Maybe you should explain everything, from the beginning.”

The good news was that the altercation at the gate was the sort of thing that Luna’s pardons were meant to be used for – no harm had been done, and it was all a misunderstanding.

The bad news was that sending out a squad of assassins to kill a Diamond Dog tribe was basically unprecedented. “It happened,” he said. “But nopony ever talked about it, and it never went to trial. It was always a diplomatic matter, where we’d accuse them of eating ponies, and they’d accuse us of sending out assassins, but no pony ever admitted to it.”

“So what does that mean?” Diamond Tiara asked.

“It means I have a lot of work ahead of me to come up with a collection of related rulings that I can make look like a precedent. I’ll start with self-defense, since they did attack you first, and with Luna’s line of reasoning about the puppies – anything that we can blame on the Diamond Dogs themselves makes it less of an open and shut case. Meanwhile… don’t get arrested. Don’t get in any more trouble. Maybe leave town? This is a bigger deal in Canterlot than anywhere else in Equestria.”

“Luna doesn’t want us to leave town,” I said.

“No, Luna doesn’t want to leave town herself. We can tell her we’re taking a few days off,” Bon Bon said. “I’m getting a little tired of this constant ‘training’ anyway.”

“Aww, but I haven’t gotten a chance to do any of it,” Spike said.

Pipsqueak said, “Then you can stay? You’re not in trouble yet.”

===

So, since we had an open invitation from that drill sergeant guy, we all hopped on the first train up to the Crystal Empire. Since we couldn’t change Spike back from a dragon-bat-pony thing – we tried a few different things, but apparently dragons are really, really tough, and he wasn’t really all that eager to break in his get-out-of-death-free card anyway – we wrapped him up in a perfectly non-suspicious black cloak. We left Luna a note telling her we were taking a vacation in the Crystal Empire. We stuffed our own armor in a perfectly non-suspicious giant purple and silver bat-themed chest, dragged it down to the train station, and shoved it into one of the overhead compartments.

Then all we had to do was tolerate each other’s existence for a few hours, and not get in a huge argument about who killed who in the middle of a crowded train car, where several ponies were reading the evening edition of the paper, which had ‘MURDERERS ON THE LOOSE – IS PRINCESS LUNA PROTECTING THESE FIENDS?’ as the headline.

The accompanying picture was of us as bat ponies, at least.

After threatening Spike with the Cloudsdale National Anthem – he curls up in a cute little quivering ball every time he hears that tune, for some reason – I got him to sing along with some classic travel songs: Fifteen Tons, Oh, Savannah, The Song That Never Ends Until Ponies Get Really Sick of it and Threaten To Shove the Singer’s Lyre Where the Sun Does Not Traditionally Shine. He also gave me a backrub, but only because it kept me quiet. I was still kind of singing, but it’s hard to sing at more than a dazed mumble while Spike is giving you a backrub, even if he is using slightly dragony hooves instead of his normal claws. The others looked out the window, or chatted about stuff, or I don’t know. It was a pretty boring trip, all told. But we arrived without incident.

“So, I guess we have to go find Mister Shouty Guy now?” I said.

“You mean Shining Armor?” Diamond Tiara asked.

“Is that his name?”

“How can you not know Prince Shining Armor? Everypony knows him!”

“Huh, sorry,” I said. “Never heard of him.”

“He’s Princess Twilight’s big brother,” DeeTee said.

“She has a brother?”

She threw her hooves in the air. “He’s married to Princess Cadance!”

“Oh right, I heard she got hitched,” I said.

“Lyra, you were a bridesmaid at his wedding,” Bon Bon said.

“No,” I said, stopping. “I wasn’t. I was going to be a bridesmaid at his wedding, only it turned out that he was marrying a Giant Evil Bug, who hypnotized me and sent me down into the crystal mines as a guard. Then Cadance, sweet, lovable Princess Cadance, took advantage of my altered mental state to throw me off a hundred foot cliff onto sharp, pointy crystals, where I broke all four of my legs and had to spend the wedding lying there in agony, staring into Twinkleshine’s dead eyes, until I finally bled out.”

“You’re still on that?” Bon Bon asked.

“It’s a good thing Mister Shouty Guy had nothing at all to do with that whole incident,” I said. “Because he’s kind of nice. I like him.”

Even though I’d explained how we couldn’t possibly be looking for Prince Shining Armor, everypony else still wanted to look for our guy at the Palace, so we headed right down the main thoroughfare, with Spike in his cloak and the big bat-themed chest wheeling along behind us. We hadn’t actually gotten to the city proper before a big blue alicorn plopped herself down right in front of us.

Pipsqueak bowed. I waved with a sheepish smile.

“I’m afraid I must cut your vacation short,” Luna informed us. “Come, I have prepared a safe house from which we can plan our next operation.”

Bug Hunt

“You may be relieved to know that I spoke with Celestia, and have resolved the situation with the Diamond Dogs,” Luna began, once we were all indoors in a nondescript crystal building on the outskirts of the city. “I was able to show her proof that the Diamond Dogs attacked first. Running down and executing the dogs who attempted to flee was justifiable, since their magic would have returned in short order, and allowed them to stage another sneak attack. Likewise, the dogs encountered in the kitchen may have only been pretending to surrender. As such, I was given leave to punish you as I see fit, rather than having any formal charges filed.”

“And the puppies?” I asked.

“There were no puppies,” Luna replied. “All the physical evidence collected by the guard will show that there were never any under aged Diamond Dogs present in the cave. Rumors of murdered puppies will be written off as an exaggeration that crept into the tale through repeated telling.”

She paused. “In the future, we will be required to cover our own tracks, or I expect I will be in for another humiliating session with my sister. I would prefer the former to the latter.”

“So we’re okay,” I said. “We got away with it.”

“Unfortunately, there is one last consideration,” Luna said, scowling. “The Diamond Dog nation is unhappy that their rogue tribe of pony-eating savages were dealt with so harshly. As an apology, they have requested our services ridding them of an infestation of vermin in the Unicorn Range.”

“It’s not changelings, is it?” Bon Bon asked. “I don’t know if I’d feel right exterminating a changeling nest. They’re almost ponies.”

“Ah, take heart, Candy Pony,” Luna said. “This is not a task with any particular moral dimension. The vermin they speak of are merely an extremely overgrown variety of spider – they neither speak, nor think.” Luna scowled. “Which makes them poor sport, and normally beneath our notice. But since our hooves are tied, we must make the best of it. Perhaps with the proper handicap, we can make this an enjoyable hunt.”

===

Since we still kind of sucked at the whole fighting deal, the proper handicap for us was ‘no invulnerable force field’. She also didn’t give us back our magic weapons. We still had the actual armor, which was pretty tough except for a few unfortunate vulnerable spots, and all the non-magical weapons we wanted, summoned out of thin air. Spike also had his own nearly-invulnerable scales under his armor, and his fire breath, since he had even less training than the rest of us.

For her own part, Luna proclaimed that she would use no magic, no weapons, and no armor. She would squish the bugs with her bare hooves.

There was still no question that we were going to win; our ‘home base’ for the operation – where we’d activate our armor, setting the point where we’d reappear when we died – was Luna’s chariot, resting on a cloud high in the sky, far from the reach of any conceivable spider counterattack. However, “If this becomes a farce like the fight with the Dogs, I will consider the game a loss,” Luna informed us. “We will continue on to exterminate the foe, but it will be but a tedious chore.

“Do not disappoint me – remember that I have yet to decide on your punishment.”

We suited up. We transformed. We strapped on hoof-claws and wing-blades and swords, and took hold of our spears. Luna stood before us, majestic in the moonlight, and spread her feathered wings – then leapt off the chariot, diving towards the forested mountains below. We all followed, in a ragged line, since formation flying wasn’t one of our normal drills and none of us had had wings before last week.

The first casualty was Bon Bon, who managed to go into a spin trying to pull out of the dive and splattered herself against a bunch of pine trees. I pulled up into a loop-the-loop – almost on purpose, I was trying to air-brake – and headed down to the crash site to make sure she was dead.

“Bonnie?” I called out, following the trail of broken branches. “Bon Bon? Are you there?”

There was a groan below me, and I landed next to a pile of branches and pine needles with a bat pony’s hind leg and fake tail protruding out. I dragged her into the open, and looked her over. She actually looked just fine – it’s hard for pegasi to hurt themselves falling or crashing, and bat ponies apparently had the same magic, or luck, or whatever it was.

“Ow. Ow ow ow,” she muttered, clambering to three legs. Her left front leg didn’t look broken, but she couldn’t put any weight on it. “Oh, ponyfeathers. That was embarrassing.”

“We can still catch up,” I said. “I think I saw the cave Luna was leading us towards. Or do you want me to kill you? Are you in a lot of pain?”

“I’ll be fine,” Bon Bon said. “Or at least I’ll be dead soon enough once we actually find the enemy.”

We arrived at the cave before too long, and found it completely covered with spider webs – it was definitely the right cave. There was the sound of fighting inside, so I stabbed at the webs with my spear and jerked it left and right until there was a big enough hole for us to fly in through. Bon Bon gave me her spear once we were inside, since she couldn’t really use it with a sprained foreleg, and mine was stuck – the webs were sticky, and really, really tough.

There was a rustle above us, and we dove to the sides as a giant spider dropped down from above. Bon Bon folded her wings and dropped right down on top of it in turn, her spiked hooves smashing into its back and cracking its chitin. It let out a long, keening shriek as it died, its legs spasming randomly as green goop oozed from its smashed abdomen – and then I realized that the shriek was from Bon Bon, who’d forgotten that one of her legs was busted.

“You sure you don’t want me to kill you?” I asked, helping her into the air. I grabbed some of the less sticky webs and tied her leg to her side to keep her from using it again accidentally. She was in too much pain to talk, but she shook her head.

The webs were everywhere, but they weren’t generally blocking the passages – just splattered across every surface so that the spiders had something to cling to as they climbed. The next few spiders we came across were trying to lurk in the darkness, but our night vision was apparently better than theirs since we could see them plainly, and they thought they were hidden. Bon Bon flew in front, since she did kind of want to die, and I played wingmare, skewering the spiders that tried to get the drop on her before they could actually touch her. The spiders we found in the tunnels weren’t very big, or very tough – about as big as a medium-sized dog – and we went through half a dozen of them before we ran into any serious resistance.

“I think we went the wrong way,” I said, as the sounds of fighting that we’d been trying to follow faded to nothing. “I don’t know where we went wrong, but there were so many turns I’m not even sure which way out is.”

Bon Bon grunted, and kept up her steady pace through the dark, sticky tunnels.

“I guess I shouldn’t really worry about it,” I said. “It’s not like we weren’t planning to wander around down here for the rest of our lives. Hee!”

She grunted again, and hovered to a stop, as the tunnel opened into a large, lit chamber full of glowing mushrooms.

Wait, that’s not a very accurate description. It was a humongous chamber, hundreds of feet across, lit by frequent clusters of glowing mushrooms, in all colors of the rainbow. At the bottom was a still, shallow pond, with pulsating cocoons half-submerged. What the chamber was full of, was spiders. Dog sized ones, pony sized ones… larger ones. Smaller ones, too. They were standing around on the floor, crawling on the walls and the ceiling, or hanging in midair from strands of web. Several of them were looking right at us.

There was a flicker of green flame from the far corner of the room, and the faint sound of Spike shouting a battlecry. Bon Bon spread her wings, setting her wing-blades in place, and dove into the swarm. I was right behind her.

We stuck to the open air, because while it wasn’t free of enemies, they were on constrained and predictable paths. They could drop straight down, or climb back up their lines, or if you saw one scuttling across the ceiling, you knew it was going to swing down on the reciprocal path in an arc. Wing blades worked really well for slicing through the lines and sending the spiders plummeting to the ground, but I wasn’t sure the fall was actually hurting them , so I made a point of impaling any that I could get a good bead on.

It was scary – even after the spear was stuck in their bodies, they’d reach forwards and pull themselves along it, like they were climbing one of their web lines, until the tip got stuck in something – in one case, the chitin on the far side of their abdominal cavity – and then they’d stretch forwards with their horrible spiky fang things and try to bite me. It’s a good thing I was wearing a helmet – it was open-faced, but I was able to turn my head to deflect the fangs. And then they’d reach the end of their rope and get yanked off the spear, and spray ichor across their brethren below who’d chitter and wave their limbs helplessly, or try to jump at me and fall far short.

It was exhausting, and disgusting – I was covered in spider goo – but it was also exhilarating. I was winning!

Then we got to the far end of the cavern, and playtime was over. In the middle of a circle of a dozen or more dead spiders, Princess Luna struggled to free herself from a sticky web pinning her wings and her two left legs. Next to her, Pipsqueak and Diamond Tiara were completely ensnared, although DeeTee had her head free and was fending off a pair of dog-sized spiders with her sword. They’d clearly come up through a hole in the floor, right into an ambush, and only Spike’s fire had kept them alive this long.

I picked the biggest spider, and dove right at it, planting my spear right in its back, just behind its eyes. I kicked off from what I hoped was its corpse and cut the legs off another spider with my wing blades, and then there was something on my back, spraying sticky crap all over my hind legs, and I rolled over to try to crush it and only managed to brush it off, at the cost of sticking my back to the webs coating the floor.

Remember how I mentioned that our armor had vulnerable spots? Well, there was one big one, right on our bellies, and mine was completely exposed.

The first two spiders to try to take advantage of that were dog-sized, and got kicked in the face. Between a pony’s natural bucking strength and the hard spiky hoof-coverings we were wearing, they didn’t get back up. The next hundred thousand spiders to try to take advantage of it were about the size of my hoof, and all I could do was stare at them in horror screaming “No no no no no!” as they swarmed over me and sunk in their fangs. I tried flailing at them with my forehooves, but they were so fast, they just leapt aside, or leapt onto my hooves, and then they were biting my legs too, and my wings, and one of them crawled onto my face.

I started to go numb, and had the presence of mind to fold my wing in against my neck, and drag the wing blade through the gap between the helmet and breastplate. It wasn’t a good cut. I was already weakening, and to tell the truth suicide was harder than killing somepony else, especially when it hurt so much – after slicing through dozens of spider webs, the blades were no longer razor-sharp. So I hesitated instead of cutting deeply, and had to lie there choking on my own blood until I finally drowned in it.

Still better than being eaten by spiders.

For the record, there is nothing sexy about being eaten by spiders. I curled up in Luna’s chariot, shivering, until Pipsqueak and Diamond Tiara appeared next to me and reminded me that there was still a fight going on.

“Nice work with the suicide,” Pipsqueak said, finding his armor where it had teleported back into the chest, and starting to put it back on. “I’m not sure we would have thought of it.”

“You’re welcome,” Diamond Tiara scoffed. “I’m the one who had to actually kill you.”

“I know. It was awesome. She cut my head clean off!” Pipsqueak said.

“Nice. Wish I’d been there to see it,” I said, getting my own armor on.

There was no privacy, but we were in a hurry, and if Pipsqueak snuck a peek, well, it wasn’t anything he couldn’t see just by looking between his own legs when he was transformed. Helping each other dress just made it all go a lot faster. So did putting the breastplate on second, after the overcoat, and transforming as soon as possible so that the rest of it actually fit. We’d been getting into this armor all week, so we pretty much had it down.

Nopony else showed up back in the carriage by the time we finished dressing. I wasn’t sure whether that was a good sign or a bad one. “We’d better not wait,” I said.

“Why would we wait?” Pipsqueak asked.

I let the two of them take the lead, since they knew the entrance that Luna had actually taken. The path was marked by Spike’s fire, and from all the bodies we passed, it looked like they’d met much heavier resistance than Bon Bon and I. Soon enough, we got to the large chamber, and found ourselves surrounded by hundreds of spiders – but Luna and the others were nowhere to be seen.

“Well,” Pipsqueak said. “This is unfortunate.”

“Stick to the air!” I said, leaping up off the ground as quickly as I could. “It’s a lot easier to fight in the air!”

It was a close thing – Diamond Tiara had to cut Pipsqueak’s leg loose after one of the spiders ran in and webbed him – but we got off the ground, and I showed them how to swoop around and mess with the spiders who tried to drop down on us. I didn’t have my spear – it was still stuck in the body of a giant spider on the floor below, and Luna hadn’t been there in the carriage to make a replacement – but cutting open the spiders with a sword or wingblades was only a little riskier, and was much faster.

And even though it wasn’t working for them, the spiders just kept coming. I was starting to see why Luna didn’t consider fighting dumb animals to be very sporting.

Then the three of us flew face-first into a giant web. They hadn’t been stupidly attacking us because they didn’t know what else to do – they’d sacrificed dozens of their fellows to keep us busy, while they prepared a trap.

Luckily for us, to keep the web hidden they hadn’t been able to have any spiders waiting on it, so we had a few seconds to try to cut ourselves free. I slashed my wingblades over my head, and used the sword in my mouth to cut away at the webs clinging to my forelegs, and then squeaked as I toppled over backwards, ending up splayed out upside down, with my whole backside stuck to the web and my rear legs wrapped up in it. It was pretty hopeless.

But that put my head near Diamond Tiara, who’d been a bit smarter and started cutting herself loose from the bottom first, so I helped get her loose, instead.

She was the only one to get away. I heard her trying to save Pipsqueak, but most of my attention was on the really big spider looming over me. I tried to kick it in the face, and it was like kicking a wall. It chittered at me, and then bit me in the thigh. The armored overcoat kept the fang from piercing my cutie mark, but the inner thigh was one of those exposed spots, and the fang just sank right into the muscle. At least it didn’t hurt for long – there was a stabbing pain, then a fiery pain, and then it was just cold and numb. I tried to kick it again, but my leg didn’t respond. The chill numbness started to flow down my body, and the spider advanced over me so that all I could see was its hairy underside, as its spinnerets started to wrap me up in a cocoon.

That did put its head in reach of my sword, but when I tried to swing it the spider just smacked it out of my grip with its forelegs – almost breaking my jaw. Then the poison reached my chest, and I stopped being able to breathe. Everything went fuzzy, and dark –

And I was back on the carriage, with Pipsqueak, who’d presumably gotten the same treatment.

“The good news is, the poison is fatal,” I said.

“The bad news is, it’s down to the two of us,” he replied.

“Yeah, this isn’t going well. Maybe we should wait for somepony else to die.”

Pipsqueak was having none of that, and scrambled to start putting on his armor. “No way – we can’t leave Diamond Tiara in there all on her own!”

“How are we even going to find her?” I asked, putting on my armor anyway. “She’s not going to be waiting in the main cavern. She’ll sneak off into one of the side passages, like Luna must have.”

“Then we’ll sneak around until we find her. This place can’t be that big.”

I stopped dressing and stared at him. “It’s a Celestia-forsaken mountain, Pip. We’re going to have to be smart about this.”

In the End…

That night, we did indeed head back to exterminate the spider nest. Luna wasn’t in the mood for a hunt, at least, so she gave us all magical flame-throwers to take out the nasty bugs more efficiently. Without the Demon Spider Queen, the spiders were a lot less organized, and didn’t really come up with an answer to being doused in flames – nopony died to them, not even once.

Not to the spiders, that is. As we were mopping up the last of them, Diamond Tiara ‘accidentally’ splashed her flame across my back, setting me on fire. I screamed in pain and retaliated, except that I wasn’t aiming very precisely, being on fire, and got Pipsqueak, too. What followed was something that you should definitely not try at home, and never, ever even talk about within ear shot of the Cutie Mark Crusaders. I call it a ‘flame-thrower fight’.

It turns out that setting ponies on fire is not a very good way to kill them. Mostly, you die from smoke inhalation, or hot-air inhalation, as your lungs fill up with fluid after being burned internally. Basically, you drown. The minute or so it took us to drown felt like an eternity when we were all on fire, and being bathed in fire, and only gradually losing the use of our limbs as the muscles cooked to the point where we couldn’t move them anymore.

Spike won, since he was immune to fire. Stupid cheating dragons.

Luna lost, since she wasn’t immune to fire, but didn’t need to breathe, and therefore didn’t actually die from being horribly burned, even after her limbs were basically reduced to charred bones and her eyes and ears were baked. Spike had to shove one of the flame-throwers into her mouth and cook her brain directly to force her to discorporate.

Her first act after re-forming was to take away all our flame-throwers. Except Spike’s, of course, since it was built-in. He had to finish off the last of the spiders himself.

===

That night, Luna asked us to suit up, but when we formed up in the training yard, we were met only by a will-o-wisp, that led us into the air, and up to the top of the Lonely Mountain. There, under the moon and stars, Luna awaited us in full battle armor, surrounded by a ring of torches that burned with a bluish purple flame.

We landed in front of her, inside the circle, and waited to hear what this was all about.

She smiled at us – a strange smile, without any of her usual viciousness. She smiled, and it reached her eyes. And then she walked over to Diamond Tiara, leaned down and nuzzled her, leaving the girl totally dumbfounded. “My Night Guard,” she said to us, wandering over next to where Bon Bon and I had landed beside each other, and enfolded both of us in her wings. “My bat ponies.” It was a few steps from there to Pipsqueak, who bowed low before her. She set a hoof gently on his head, and patted his mane. “My children of the night.” Spike, at this point, was giving her a wary look, so she merely nodded to him. “I am so proud of all of you.”

She continued her path until she was back on the far side of the circle, facing us. “Rise,” she said, although only Pipsqueak was bowing. I gave a quick bow of my head so that I could lift it again.

“I will not pretend that your training is complete,” she said, “but you have all come so far, and the rest is simply a matter of continuing to learn and grow. There is no point delaying this any further. You have passed my test – you have all passed, and should you so desire it, I offer you a permanent place by my side.”

There were a few moments of silence. It was starting to get uncomfortable, so I chimed in, “Oh.”

Luna’s smile started to fade. “You do not sound pleased.”

“Well… I’ve had fun, Princess,” I told her, “but I don’t think I can sign up for good. This isn’t the life I want.”

“It isn’t?” Bon Bon asked.

“It’s definitely not the life I want for you,” I told her, giving her a nuzzle. “And it’s just so much training, and so much fighting, and so little time for music,” I explained to Luna.

Luna nodded, although she still looked disappointed. “And the rest of you?”

“Sorry,” Spike said. “Twilight needs me. I can stay here for another week or two, but I can’t sign on forever.”

She turned to Pipsqueak, who scratched at the ground with a hoof and didn’t meet her gaze. “Luna… Princess… I would do anything for you.”

“I would not have you do anything you do not wish to do,” Luna replied. “I would have you be happy.”

“I’m not happy,” he said. “I hate this. I hate the fighting and the dying and all the pain, it’s just no fun at all. Plus none of the fillies here will give me the time of day. They all know me and none of them really like me.”

“Oh,” Luna said, her ears flattening.

“I don’t suppose there’s an opening for a Royal Consort?” Pipsqueak asked.

“There is not,” Luna snorted, amused.

“Well, I’ll accept,” Diamond Tiara said. “These losers don’t know a good thing when they see it. You’re my ticket to fame and fortune, and if I have to dress up as a bat and get my hooves dirty, then it’s totally worth it. Besides – it’s this, or retail. Ugh.” She scrunched up her face and shivered.

“Although it’s not going to be the same if I’m your only bat pony,” she added. “How will that even work?”

“I never intended for you to be the only members of my Night Guard,” she said. “You were the suitable ponies in Ponyville. I will find more in some other town. Manehattan, perhaps. I had hopes, since so many of you passed, that I could have multiple squads, with you as the leaders…” before any of us could change our minds at that incentive, she continued on. “But such is not to be. I understand that this life is not for everypony.”

I had a thought. “Wait – when we started, didn’t you say it didn’t have to be all or nothing? Because it is fun, and I do enjoy it, I just don’t want to do it all the time.”

Luna brightened a little. “Yes, I offered that as an option. You can go back to your normal life, and I will call on you only when my need is great.”

“You should have her come in periodically for some training, or she’ll forget everything she learned,” Diamond Tiara said. “One weekend a month is the schedule the militia uses.”

“Weekends are actually bad for us,” Bon Bon said. “Maybe Twosdays and Windsdays?”

“The first Twosday and Windsday of the month?” Diamond Tiara asked. “Which would mean your next appointment would be on the… fourth?”

“That works,” Bon Bon replied.

DeeTee looked at me. I grinned back at her. “My schedule’s always open. You know that.”

“Well, now it’s not,” she replied. “You’ve got an appointment on the fourth.”

I saluted, and turned back to Luna, who nodded at me. I guess that meant that she accepted the arrangement.

“I can do that too,” Pipsqueak said. “I guess. It’s just a few days a month.”

“Is it truly what you desire?” Luna asked him.

“It’s worth it to spend time with you, Princess,” he replied.

“In that case, all of you – place your hoof over your heart, and repeat after me. I, state your name, do solemnly swear…”

“I, Lyra Heartstrings, do solemnly swear…” I said, alongside the babble of other names from the other bat ponies.

That I will be the blade in the night, that cuts the web of evil before it can ensnare the innocent who walk in the day.
That I will act always with resolve and compassion, and never turn my blade upon the innocent or on those who can be redeemed.
That I will uphold the honor of the night, and of the Night Guard, in all my actions.
That I will follow my Princess into darkness, but never into evil, save to turn her back from the precipice if I can.
That I will not have sex in the barracks, neither with my fellow guards, nor with camp followers, and especially not with changelings…

We all sort of broke down laughing at that point, aside from Pipsqueak who tried to melt into the ground. “Maybe the oath doesn’t need to be quite that specific?” I suggested.

“I have seen what you all have been up to, and I think that perhaps it does,” Luna replied.

===

We spent the rest of the night in ‘merriment’ of the style that Luna had enjoyed a thousand years before, which was surprisingly similar to what the Royal Guard still does for fun today. Only with more mead. I kind of like mead.

In the morning, we all headed back to Ponyville, except for Diamond Tiara of course. We were all given our armor to take with us, just in case we needed it and there wasn’t time to get in touch with Luna. Even Spike got to keep his, and he hadn’t even taken the oath.

“Well, it’s not like she has any other dragons to give it to,” I pointed out.

“I just feel a little guilty that I get this sweet suit of magic armor, and I barely even did anything with you guys,” he replied. He was back in his drake form – we’d finally found one thing that dragon-bat-ponies weren’t immune to. Alcohol poisoning.

“She’s hoping you’ll change your mind,” Bon Bon said.

“Well, I’m not,” Spike said. “Once Twilight’s feeling better I’ll be back to being her number one assistant.”

We stared out the windows of the train for a while, as it wound its way down the side of the mountain.

“Do you think Rarity would be into bat ponies?” Spike asked. “I mean, just theoretically, you know.”

“I don’t know, Spike,” I said. “I don’t think she’s into mares.”

Meeting the Princess

The gates of Canterlot Palace were wide open, with only a pair of Royal Guards standing to either side for ceremonial purposes. Or maybe it’s so that any invaders would have somepony to demonstrate their power on before blasting a trail of destruction all the way to the throne room.

We were doing a good job of blending in with the steady stream of ponies walking in and out of the gate, until Diamond Tiara decided to ask for directions.

“Excuse me!” she said, to the guard staring stoically straight ahead. “My associates and I have an audience with Princess Luna. You may have the honor of escorting us to her presence.”

The guard broke his stance, and looked down at her. “May I see your invitation?”

“No you may not,” she replied haughtily.

“I’m afraid I can’t take your word for it, miss. I’ll need some sort of proof that you were really summoned by Princess Luna.”

“Eh, don’t worry about it,” Spike said, motioning for us to follow as he headed for the gate. “Come on, girls. We can find her without their help.”

“Halt!” said both guards in unison, their spears suddenly barring our path.

“What gives?” Spike asked, his tongue flicking out of his frowning muzzle for a second. “The Palace is open to the public.”

“You are not the public, young drake,” the original guard replied. “You are a group of suspicious individuals, who’ve expressed an interest in one of the princesses.”

“So, what?” I asked, looking around at the gathering crowd. It wasn’t that they found us interesting, so much as that as long as we were playing around with the guards they couldn’t get through the gate either. “Now you arrest us for not having the proper paperwork to visit a public attraction?” I could tell I was grinning, and why wouldn’t I be? We hadn’t actually done anything wrong, and you couldn’t buy this sort of publicity.

“They wouldn’t dare,” Tiara said, glaring at the guard and reaching up to push his spear aside. It didn’t move. “Get out of my way! Or do you want to answer to the Princess?”

“Princess Luna instructed us that she was not to be disturbed,” the other guard replied, shifting his spear to point right at Diamond Tiara’s chest. I’m not an expert on anatomy, but I’m pretty sure that pointing at the side of her chest wasn’t really the optimal stabbing location, since her shoulder and ribs were both between the spear tip and anything vital. The message was pretty clear, though.

“Back down, DeeTee,” I said, putting a hoof on her flank, since it was the part I could reach. “We can come back later.”

“I’m not coming back later!” she snarled, her tail whipping at me until I pulled back my hoof. “I’ve been summoned by Princess Luna, and I will not let these featherbrains make me late!”

“They’re going to stab you,” I said. “They are going to literally impale you on their literal sharp, pointy spears.”

She looked at me with disgust. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d probably get yourself off while you watched.” She turned back to the guards. “Is that true, big guy? Are you going to hold me down while your partner impales me on his big… pointy… spear?” The last three words spoken while she advanced on the guard whose spear was now pointing directly at her sternum, and poked him repeatedly in the chest. He had no choice but to lift the point, since he didn’t want to impale her.

“Literal!” I repeated, waving my arms at her. “Not metaphorical!”

She laughed. “They won’t lay a hoof on me.”

“If you step through the gate, we’ll have no choice but to use force,” said the first guard, now behind her, his spear held out to continue to block the path.

I lit my horn, lifted my lyre from my saddlebag, and started playing a catchy little tune I’d picked up from Twilight.

La la la… la la
La la la… la la
I see you’re trying to work together…
I see you trying to block the gate.
I’ve thought of something that is better,
to let you unleash all your hate.

Why should you have to have a partner
who’ll misinterpret all the rules?
It’s time to prove that you’re the hero
who’ll hold the gate against the fools!

Battle!
You want to win it!
Let’s have a battle!
Battle of the guards!

Battle!
Yeah, go all in it!
Let’s have a battle…
Battle…
Baaaaattmmmphle--

Suddenly, a pair of hooves covered my mouth, and Bon Bon wrestled me to the ground, choking off the music right in the middle of the chorus. The lyre dropped to the cobblestones with a metallic ‘clang’.

Have you ever been ‘in the zone’? I’m sure you have – everypony does it sometimes. I do it almost all the time when I’m playing – the music just fills me up and spills out into the world, and everything else is just… background.

Bon Bon snapped me right out of that state, and I suddenly noticed that at some point, both of the guards had shifted their spears to point at me instead of at DeeTee.

Yeah. That spell-song didn’t work for Unicorns either.

“Ma’am, were you attempting to use a magical compulsion on us?” one of the guards asked, his expression grim.

Bon Bon took her hooves off my mouth, and gave me a worried look. I smiled back at her, as if to say ‘don’t worry, I’ve got this’ as I climbed back to my feet, the spear points following me up.

“Yep! Did it work? You look more aggressive, although you were supposed to direct it at each other.” I stretched my neck forwards to peer closely at one of them – I wasn’t crazy enough to pull Diamond’s stunt where she made them move their spears. He didn’t actually look any different from before – still stoic, still humorless. “I guess it still needs work.”

The guard frowned. “Ma’am, using mental magic on a member of the guard with the intention of subverting their duty is a serious crime.”

“Really?” I blinked. “I guess it’s a good thing that siren magic doesn’t work for unicorns, then, or I would have been in trouble.”

“I’m afraid that I’m going to have to ask you to come with us,” he continued.

“No,” Bon Bon said.

The guards turned to look at her. “What are you holding in your hoof, miss?” the other one asked.

It looked like a mottled purple and green crystal. “Rock candy,” Bon Bon replied, popping it into her mouth.

She bit down, and with a crackling noise like a bucket full of gravel pouring out into a ditch, her body shifted into a purple and green rock candy golem. She also grew to be about ten feet tall. “Let her go,” she said, her voice deep and gravelly.

One of the guards panicked, and tried to stab her, but his spear point only penetrated about an inch before it got stuck. She leaned forwards, snapping the shaft with her weight, and lifted her hoof over his head.

Spike, who’d been keeping a low profile, breathed a thin trickle of flame at the other spear-point, still pointing at me even though the wielder’s attention was on Bon Bon. It melted in less than a second, the molten metal puddling on the ground between my hooves. “Come on,” he said, grabbing my foreleg and dragging me around the guard. “This is our chance!”

So, yeah. That’s how we all ended up in the Canterlot dungeons.

Well, not all of us. Me, Spike, and about ninety percent of Bon Bon, since they’d smashed her rock candy form into little fruity pebbles. Grape flavored – and perfectly safe to eat, since it was the original candy that had been enchanted, and this was just magically created, perfectly ordinary, no-longer-animated sugar crystals. Spike still wouldn’t eat any of it, for some reason.

After an hour or two – time is kind of weird in prison – it all vanished, and Bon Bon popped back into existence. A bit later, there was a knock at the door, and the jailor came in, with Princess Luna in tow.

Luna was not amused.

“When I told you to come find me if you wished to accept my invitation, I expected more subtlety,” she said, her mane and tail swirling around in the air behind her, giving her a halo of night from which her frowning face stared down at us.

“But you told me to make a fool of myself,” I protested.

“Ah. So I did,” Luna replied, her tone never shifting from the same semi-emotionless drone. “Then the fault is mine. Guard, release them.”

The jailor wasn’t very happy about his first prisoners in ages being unceremoniously released. “With all due respect, princess, the charges against them are –“

“Irrelevant,” Luna replied. “Nopony was seriously hurt. Consider them pardoned.”

“Yes… princess,” the guard said, with something trying very very hard to be respect but falling flat on its face. But he let us out of the cell, so I’m not complaining.

What surprised me was that Luna wasn’t complaining either.

===

We passed through the hallways of the castle in silence, and saw few ponies as we walked. I wasn’t feeling quiet brave enough to start chit-chatting with Luna if she wanted to keep herself company in her own thoughts, so I took out the book full of maps and tried to find out where we were and where we were going.

“You’re holding it upside down,” Spike said helpfully. He and Bon Bon were flanking me, as I trailed in Luna’s wake

“I’m trying to line it up with the direction I think we’re going,” I said. “You lived here, didn’t you? Do you recognize anything?”

Spike spent the next few minutes staring at the tapestries on the walls, the colorful patterns on the windows, and took a nice long look down the cross passages when we came to an intersection. “Eh, I got nothing,” he said at least. “This whole place is a maze.”

“Indeed,” Luna replied evenly. “It was designed to baffle intruders, and lead them away from anything important. Were this a time of war, it would be reinforced by magical misdirection and fog, but in peacetime it is protected only by the architect’s insanity.”

“It seems like we’ve been walking in circles,” I said. “How do you find anything in here?”

“Those who live here quickly learn the proper turns to take to get between the places they need to travel. Few need memorize more than two or three routes.” Luna stopped at the next intersection, looking around, and then noticed I was holding a book. “Is that a map? I have rarely had need to visit the dungeons, and my methodical search pattern seems to be leading us in circles.”

Between Spike, Luna, myself, and the map, we managed to eventually find our way to one of the kitchens, where Bon Bon forced us to ask directions. The servants there knew the way to the bureaucrats’ cafeteria, which Spike had eaten at once when Twilight was dealing with some ‘boring princess stuff’. From there, we found our way to the library, which Spike and Luna both knew well.

“So, if I’m reading this map right,” I said, holding the book up at an angle to align it with the library shelves, “we just need to find the second door from the west at the far end of the library, go down the hall and take the second right into a bigger hallway, follow that main passage around three turns, and then look for this little sally gate that opens onto the exercise grounds.”

Luna gave a snort. “I know the way from here.” She led us up to the second floor of the library, where a door opened out onto what had looked like a balcony on the map, but was actually more of a patio. It would have been a straight shot from there, if we’d had wings, but even sticking to a route with stairs it was basically impossible to get lost, since we could see the crumbling tower of the lunar barracks the entire time.

Luna directed us to the lounge where the other recruits were already waiting, and told us to get acquainted while she made some final preparations.

Diamond Tiara was waiting for us, of course, sitting on a couch and looking very bored. Pipsqueak, of all ponies, was on the other half of the couch, facing the other direction and scowling at the wall. Apparently they really weren’t an item.

“There you are!” Spike shouted, pointing at her. “You just ran off and left us!”

DeeTee rolled her eyes. “I snuck off to find the Princess while you idiots were creating a distraction. If it wasn’t for me, you’d still be in jail. You’re welcome.”

“If it wasn’t for you, we could have just walked through the gate,” Bon Bon pointed out, as she hopped onto one of the other couches.

I hopped up next to her. “It all turned out for the best, right?”

“For the best? Are you crazy?” Spike said, flailing his arms around with careless disregard to how close his dangerous claws were getting to various ponies’ faces. “I’ve been arrested! By the Royal Guard! I have a criminal record now! Those things are permanent!”

“Please don’t fight,” came a soft little voice from behind Tiara’s couch.

Spike narrowed his eyes, then walked over and put his claws on Tiara and Pipsqueak’s backs as he leaned over the couch to see who’d made the noise. “Fluttershy?”

===

Luna returned a bit later, floating a huge chest in her magic. It settled to the ground with a heavy ‘thunk’. “I am pleased that of the five ponies I invited to join me here today, six of you have shown up on the very first day. Spike, candy pony, please explain your presence.”

“I’m here for moral support,” Bon Bon replied, with a suspicious glare. “If what you’re asking Lyra to do is immoral, I’ll remind her that she doesn’t need to say yes.”

“And I’m here to stay out of Twilight’s hair until she’s feeling better,” Spike said, pausing the backrub he’d been giving Fluttershy in an attempt to calm her down. “You said you wanted monsters, right? Firebreathing dragon, right here.”

“I invited them,” I said. “So, blame me if they’re not supposed to be here, although you didn’t say you were inviting anypony but me, and you didn’t give me any sort of physical invitation to show the guards so that they wouldn’t arrest us or anything.”

Luna fixed her gaze on me, and in the black depths of her pupil, I could have sworn I saw the end of all life and hope. “Indeed,” she said, as I sat there fascinated. “My handling of this matter was not without fault.” She gave a deep sigh, closed her eyes, and looked away, and I felt my fur suddenly lie flat from where it must have been standing on end as I was released from her stare. “And, as it happens, they may indeed be suitable. Nothing has been promised yet on either side, and nopony will be accepted into my service without being tested.

“Spike, candy pony –“

“Sweetie Drops,” Bon Bon said.

Luna nodded, and continued. “I would be pleased to extend the offer I was about to make to the ponies I invited to you two as well. There is no obligation – at any point, now or during training, up until the final oaths are sworn, any of you are free to withdraw and return home, with no fear of reprisal or dishonor. But it would please me greatly if you all would consider my offer, because my need is great.”

“We’re listening,” Diamond Tiara said. “Get to the part where we get to be part of your entourage?”

“In due time,” Luna replied smoothly. “As you may have noticed, when I must be seen in public, I have been under the protection of the Royal Guard. Even when, for ceremonial purposes, my own guards are needed, they are merely on loan from Celestia’s Royal Guard. If you were to ask her, she would say that maintaining a separate guard for my own exclusive use is expensive and unnecessary, and that it sends the wrong message about the unity of our government. After all, I don’t require my own maid service, or my own staff.”

“I would be proud to serve in your guard!” Pipsqueak said, leaping to his feet and kneeling before the Princess. “You have always been the Princess – no, the pony that I hold dearest in my heart. For you, I would swear any oath, face any foe!”

“Unfortunately, I am not afforded a guard unit of my own,” Luna replied. “And if loyalty were the only quality that I sought in my new attendants, I would gladly swear you to service on the spot. However, it is not.” She stomped her hoof, and the ‘clack’ when it hit the floor thundered through the room, and would have sent Fluttershy back behind a couch if Spike hadn’t held tightly to her.

“So, officially, the only position I am able to offer is that of a hoofmaiden. For those of you who wish to live with me here in Canterlot,” she looked at Diamond Tiara, and Pipsqueak, “that is the capacity in which you will be employed. For those who have other obligations,” she looked to Fluttershy and Spike, “you will continue to live as you always have, save for when I have need of you.

“But in truth, you will become the ponies with whom I will safeguard Equestria from the threats that the Royal Guard is not prepared to face. When I hunt the creatures that lurk in the darkness, you will be my fangs!”

“Eeee!” I said, leaning forwards. “Really? We get to be secret agents?”

Spike was less impressed. “Isn’t that already Fluttershy’s job?” he asked. Fluttershy said nothing, her face hidden behind her wings as she tried to burrow underneath Spike and hide.

“I don’t know,” Diamond Tiara said. “This sounds like a lot of work.”

Luna raised an eyebrow at her. “Did you really think you could ingratiate yourself with me without proving your worth?” she asked.

“Fine,” DeeTee said, rolling her eyes. “But if I go fight monsters for you, you’re going to take me out to all the fancy parties.”

Luna looked a bit uncomfortable. “I may be able to arrange the occasional appearance.”

“At least once a week,” Tiara insisted. “Or I’m leaving right now.”

Luna’s nose scrunched up in disgust. “Ugh. Very well, if you can survive the training.”

“We could die in training?” Fluttershy asked. “You didn’t say we could even die in training!” Spike tried to hold her down, but she squirmed out of his grip and fluttered randomly around the room in a panic. “Thank you for the offer but I really have to get back to my animals and I’m sure you’ll find plenty of ponies to go do horribly dangerous things with horribly frightening monsters and thank you so much and I’m just going to be going now!”

She froze in mid-flutter, surrounded by Luna’s aura. “Be calm, dear Fluttershy. Did I not assure you that this would be perfectly safe?”

“It doesn’t sound safe,” Bon Bon said. “It sounds like you want us to go be adventurers. That’s not safe, that’s suicide.”

“I went on an adventure, and I didn’t die!” I said, nuzzling her.

“Yes you did,” Bon Bon said.

“Well… Pipsqueak didn’t die,” I said, motioning to the young colt who’d helped fight off the dragons I’d ran afoul of, once Ponyville decided they were being too much of a nuisance. “He kicked the dragons’ tails, and got the girl and everything.” I didn’t even look in DeeTee’s direction, but I could feel her staring daggers at me. “And I didn’t really die, thanks to you. Did I ever tell you that I love you?”

She didn’t take the bait, and instead addressed the Princess. “Luna, this really sounds like the sort of thing for trained guardsponies, not over-eager idiots like my roommate.”

“You will be trained,” Luna insisted, and set a foot on the chest she’d brought. “And in addition –“

“Yeah, but they already are trained,” Spike said. “I mean, they totally wiped the floor with us.”

“They are trained to protect, and to guard,” Luna said, with a scowl. “They do not hunt, they do not venture into the wilderness beyond our walls unless escorting royalty, and only as a very last resort do they kill. They are not worthy. You… may be.”

Her horn lit, and she opened the chest, revealing a tangle of armor plates and helmets, all done up in silver and blue. “Don the armor and join me in the training grounds, and we shall see.”

Down in the Depths

“Marco!” I shouted into the cave entrance. The mountain-side was riddled with them, and they all led to the same network of spider caves. Not that these were digging spiders – all these tunnels had originally been Diamond Dog mines. And I suppose we were here to make sure that they were Diamond Dog mines again, although the Unicorn Range was pretty deep in Equestria, so it was kind of weird that it was any of the Diamond Dogs’ business. Maybe they had free run under the surface or something.

“Marco!” I shouted again, just in case somepony was close, but hadn’t heard the first time. I was shouting ultrasonically, hopefully out of range of the spiders’ hearing, although to tell the truth I wasn’t even sure that they had ears.

There was no response, so I moved on to the next tunnel. Pip and I had spent a good hour mapping out all the tunnels we could see. We scratched the map into the floor of Luna’s chariot with our wingblades. We figured she wouldn’t mind. Or that she’d make us sand it out after the mission. It wasn’t like the chariot itself was a magical artifact.

There were thirty seven tunnels. We were taking them in groups of six.

“Marco!” I shouted ultrasonically into the next tunnel, and waited.

“Polo!” came a faint voice back.

“Okay, wait there! I’m going to go get Pip!”

It took about fifteen minutes to chase him down, but he’d had no luck, so we headed back to the tunnel. “Marco!” I shouted again, just to make sure.

There was no response.

“Are you sure this was the one?” he asked.

I looked around, and went over it again in my head… yeah, this was the place. “It was pretty faint. If they had to move at all, they might be out of range. Let’s go in a ways and try again.”

We were pretty low on the mountain, and these tunnels didn’t have very many spider webs, and we didn’t run into any spiders before we got to the first intersection. “Marco!” I shouted, and while I didn’t hear anypony calling back to us, I did get some weird echoes from one of the side tunnels. I chirped properly down it a few times, and realized that it was a pretty short dead end. So at least we knew which way to go.

Down the dead end, of course, to see if anypony was hiding there. Nopony was.

The next intersection was a small chamber, with some rusting prison cells against one wall, and a stone table with a diamond dog skeleton stretched out across it. “You know, if we were playing Oubliettes and Ogres, there’d be some treasure on that skeleton,” I said. “Go check it for traps!”

Pipsqueak laughed, and poked at the skeleton with his spear a few times. It crumbled a bit, but there was no sign of treasure. “The spiders must have taken all the gems.”

“What would spiders want with gems?”

“They use them to lure in adventurers, of course,” Pipsqueak said. “That, or they eat them.”

“I’m pretty sure these spiders eat meat,” I said. “So, which way?”

We chirped down the tunnels, and went the way that gave the strongest echo, in the hopes that it was another dead end. It sort of was – it was a small complex of abandoned rooms and stuff, from when the Diamond Dogs had lived there. There was no treasure, and no spiders, and none of the skeletons got up and attacked us. We still made sure to leap into every room to surprise anything that might be lurking inside, and Pip poked his spear into every dark corner, just in case.

The next tunnel we tried led to a pretty standard mine shaft. The lift was long gone. It went down. “I don’t think we want to go down,” I said. “All the spiders we fought were up from here.”

“Marco!” Pipsqueak chirped down the shaft.

“Marco!” chirped somepony from below.

“You’re supposed to say Polo!” I shouted down at them.

“Polo!” they called back.

“I don’t like this,” Pipsqueak hissed.

“What choice do we have?” I asked.

We floated down the shaft side by side, flapping our wings slowly in a hover, but letting ourselves descend at a nice steady pace. There were levels where the Diamond Dogs had branched off to mine some seam of gems or another, and we shouted ‘Marco!’ at every level, but the response was always calling us down into the depths.

Eventually, it got dark enough that even our bat pony eyes couldn’t see a thing, and we had to chirp to see where the walls were. The thing at the bottom of the shaft – by this point I was sure that it was not a pony – kept chirping back at us, which interfered with our returns and made our mental map of the shaft go fuzzy.

“This isn’t one of our friends,” I said. “We should go back up.”

“Yeah,” Pipsqueak said, continuing to descend.

I continued to descend as well. I knew that I wanted to go up, instead, but I couldn’t clearly form the thought of how to move my wings to make myself do that. “Okay, we’re totally bucked,” I said. “Suicide time?”

“Sounds good,” Pipsqueak said, but we couldn’t do that, either.

At the bottom of the shaft was a vast dark web, which quivered in our echolocation like a fluffy field of grass. We might have been fooled if it wasn’t for the giant spider looming in the center of it.

Ah, little ponies, I wondered what manner of creature was stirring my children to such heights of terror. Tell me, little ponies, what brings you to my parlor?

“We’re hunting your children,” I said, unable to even remain silent. In a way, this was familiar – it wasn’t the first time I’d had my mind stolen from me. But the changeling queen had been gentle by comparison. I’d been tricked. This time, I knew what was going on, but my thoughts were not my own – my mind was a puppet on the spider’s strings. “The Diamond Dogs want their mountain back.”

Well they can’t have it! I’d tell you to send them a message, but I don’t think I care enough to let one of you go and deliver it. It’s so rare that anyone comes all the way down here to meet me in person. Tell me about yourselves. What do you do? How can you best amuse me? Ponies each have special talents, right?

“I’m an adventurer!” Pipsqueak volunteered, against his will. “I hunt monsters, and protect the weak!”

Boring, and useless, the spider queen replied. If I want monsters hunted, I can have my children swarm them. Still, I can always use you as a puppet. Pipsqueak flew around the room, at her direction, doing aerobatics that he wasn’t really skilled or flexible enough to pull off – and when he failed, he’d jerk to a stop in midair, as if suspended on physical strings, and not scream at all even though his wings were contorted into painful positions. And when you break, I’ll lay a clutch of eggs in your brain. Pony-fed children are always the most intelligent.

She turned to me. And you?

“I’m a musician,” I told her. “I play the lyre, I sing, I even compose music. I don’t have my lyre with me, but if you’d like, I could sing a song for you?”

Ah, now that is something novel indeed. Go on, little one, sing me your song. But make certain that it pleases me, or your skull will make a lovely nesting place for my next clutch.

Singing is a creative endeavor. You can try to do it by rote, if there’s a song that you’ve memorized and sung a thousand times, but that’s not the same as a song from the heart. The spider knew this, and when she felt me wriggle in her web to try to come up with the perfect words to sing her praises, she let her strings loosen, just a little. I still couldn’t have killed myself, or tried to leave, since she had specific orders in place about that, but I could decide what to sing.

And I knew just what to sing. I started out quietly, in a conspiratorial tone. A minor-keyed tune, with just a hint of urgency. The song was going somewhere, and I needed for her to follow.

Down in the darkness
Underneath the stone
Nesting in its web
The spider makes her home

The queen of all she senses
All that wriggles in her web
The tiny creatures trapped like bugs…
They wriggle ‘till they’re dead

But don’t think her a monster
We all have lies we tell
We all have webs we spin
We all would cast that spell

We usually never notice
We never, ever tell
We barely even whisper
To ourselves…

La la la, la la la, you didn’t notice you fell
La la la, la la la, and now you’re under my spell
La la la, la la la, you didn’t notice you fell
La la la, la la la, and now you’re under my spell

Blindsided by the music of my heart
That wound around your puppet strings, so gentle at the start
You didn’t even notice you fell...

You felt it creep around your legs and tickle at the hair
You started swaying to the beat that you and I both share
And now you’ve fallen under my spell…

I’ve got the music
Makes you move it
Got the sound that makes you lose it
Lifts your soul so very high,
Look above you, there’s just sky.

I’ve got the music
Makes you move it
Got the sound that makes you lose it
Drags you down into the deep,
Look below you, there’s the sea.

Now swirl around with me…
Floating in eternity…
Sinking slowly into sleep…
Sleep…
Sleeeeeep….

I took the spear out of Pipsqueaks hooves. He didn’t resist me – he was asleep as well. The spider‘s spell was still wound around my mind, keeping me from leaving, but it didn’t stop me from approaching her, even with a weapon. She’d never ordered us not to attack – we were insects to her. Nothing we could do could hurt her.

So I plunged the spear right into her stupid eye. The largest one, on the left. There was a bit of resistance at first, but the spear was sharp, and the body I was wearing was strong. I drove the shaft all the way in, into her brain, as deep as I could until the end of the handle was buried in the gooey slime where her eye had been – and she screeched, horribly, waking to agony and flailing around with her limbs…

So, no, it didn’t kill her. But it did break her spell. Pipsqueak and I flew out of there like a pair of bat ponies out of Tartarus, and didn’t stop until we were back in Luna’s chariot.

“We need to go higher,” Pipsqueak babbled. “Luna, take us higher. She can jump! She can jump this high, Luna!”

“She can’t even fit up the mine shaft,” I said. “She’s huge. Luna, giant demon spiders from the pits of Tartarus can’t squeeze through tiny tunnels large enough for two ponies to fly up side by side, can they?”

Luna stared back at us, and rested a wing on each of our heads, calming us as if by magic. “So that was why the spiders seemed so organized. There is a mind behind them, after all.”

“Spider,” I said. “Demon spider. Giant demon spider!”

I felt the wave of calm redouble its effect, and sunk to the ground. I was calm enough to notice that Spike was there, watching me nervously, and that two other bat ponies were hovering nearby. So the gang was all together, at least.

“I should not be surprised that this infestation was not the result of random chance. The Diamond Dogs dug too greedily, and too deep, and broke through into Tartarus.” Luna paused to sigh. “Again.”

“Does this happen a lot?” Spike asked.

“Constantly,” Luna growled. “Why do you think there is peace between our peoples? They rely on my sister and I to seal the breaches. Wait here, and I will close this gate. It is never safe for mortals to approach a denizen of Tartarus – few are strong-willed enough to escape with their sanity intact.”

Luna was gone for a while. We sat and/or hovered around making small talk, and comparing notes on the fight with the spiders. Pip and I told them about the Demon Spider Queen, and we didn’t exaggerate at all. I’m not even sure how we could have!

I sang them the song I’d sung to her, but nopony fell asleep or got hypnotized in any way. Spike guessed that it was her psychic link to me that had made her vulnerable to it, since I didn’t have mind magic of my own. “It’s like when Twilight was fighting the Sirens – she and her friends were able to sing a counterspell, even though they never would have been able to hypnotize the students out of the blue like the Sirens could.”

Then I sort of dozed off, because I was bored. I think Bon Bon and Spike started playing tic tac toe on the floor of Luna’s chariot.

The sun was glowing on the horizon, politely asking the moon to please give way so that daylight could begin, for almost an hour before Luna returned, looking absolutely exhausted. She was wearing the tattered remains of some sort of magical armor, and collapsed in a heap in the middle of the chariot, breathing heavily. Her hooves and the edges of her wings were trailing off into smoke, as if she was on the verge of dissolving completely.

“It is done,” she said.

Her horn glowed briefly, and the moon dropped from the sky like its strings had been cut. The sun rose majestically into place, and Luna fell asleep, her eyes closed and her chest rising and falling peacefully. Every so often, she’d stir and give a loud, un-ladylike snort, or kick at the air with a single hoof.

When we got tired of giggling at her, we took turns dragging the chariot back to Canterlot. It was really a job for a two-pony team, but since Luna had pulled the chariot out to the mountains it was only fitted with a single harness. When we got in range of the Royal Guard patrols, we let them take over, and headed back to the barracks, because it was closer than the Crystal Empire.

“We’re going to have to go back and finish off the rest of the spiders tomorrow, aren’t we?” Bon Bon remarked. Everypony groaned.

A Few Weeks Later

“And there’s really nothing else to tell,” Lyra said to Rose, as the two of them sat at the café, sipping milkshakes. “Bonnie and I went back for our first touch-up training session earlier this week, and the recruits from Manehattan were really creepy. That might have just been because we didn’t know them as well, though. Diamond Tiara seemed to get along with them just fine.”

Rose nodded, as if she believed a word that Lyra had said. “So the next time there’s a monster attack in Ponyville, can I expect to see you two flying around to help fight them off?”

“Maybe,” Lyra said, looking around conspiratorially. “Although this is Fluttershy’s territory, and I really don’t want to step on her hooves any more than I already have. Can you imagine how she’d feel if we hurt one of her cutesy wootsey little Manticores?”

Rose winced. “She’d tear your head off.”

“Yeah,” Lyra said, resting her chin on a hoof. “That would be kind of cool, actually.”