Paper Prince

by JLB

Rating: teen
Tags: Comedy, Adventure, Prince Blueblood, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Other, Original Character
Length: 55783

Prince Blueblood and his emissary team are having a bit of trouble coming back to Equestria after a political visit to the Frozen North. Not that they should worry - never would Equestria abandon its Prince.

Prince Blueblood, the last Prince of the Unicornian dynasty, winner of three consecutive beauty contests, patron of the arts, and a highly sought-over stallion, is, as described, vital to the political life of the Equestrian kingdom. Princess Celestia's secretary Raven, an overall unremarkable, barely present in any records, plain unicorn pony, is nothing in particular, and was most likely sent merely to make sure nobody at all troubles the brilliant mind that is Blueblood. The dozen engineers that operate their vehicle on the way to, and especially back from, the capital of the Frozen North, are simply lucky to have had a chance to share a trip with the sterling Prince.

That is the status quo all of them would like to believe, and it is definitely not going to stay intact over the 42 days it will take them to return.

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Proofreading and minor assistance by Dark Avenger. Cover art by sean7700, although an eternal WiP after a few things went down.

Part of a prequel one-shot series to a much bigger fic, currently in the works. It is definitely more Dark than Comedy, so don't expect the usual Comedy fare. It was not the intent of the fic, more the outcome of putting these characters into these situations with this story in mind. TL;DR INCREDIBLY DARK, less incredibly comedic.

Same series as VIS_016.evi, Vermillion, Vis-a-Vis, Styx Enterprises and Nick and Penny.

Published 2015-07-21 02:20:01 UTC
Last updated 2015-12-07 00:53:12 UTC

Day Three: Sudden Recovery

DAY THREE

Equestria’s dignified emissary to the distanced and recently estranged provinces in the Frozen North, Prince Blueblood, rolled from one side of his overly cushioned bunk to the other. His head was gripped tight between his hooves, and the graceful blonde locks that adorned it formed sweat-stuck clumps. The mission vehicle’s engine choked and snortled out infernal noises, shaking the entire ViP cabin as if it was a ceremonial bottle of champagne. Again and again, the machine’s death throes pushed deeper and deeper into the Prince’s inner being, and so masked the many moans and gurgles he emitted as the shaking continued.

In the defense of such improper display by Prince Blueblood, this snowplower engine mishap had come into play exactly three days prior. This travesty had been going on for three days by then - only getting worse with each attempt to reignite. The magic-powered chargers that were supposed to keep the vehicle operational in all cases without exception, embedded in the outer hull, were dim - mysteriously gone out the moment the Equestrian mission entered this dreaded patch of land. Ever since having wheeled half the ribcage of a valley, their vehicle had been more or less dead as a doorknob.

By the efforts of a particuarly violent cough, Blueblood was thrown off the bunk and onto the fine, lavishly light brown wooden floor of his cabin. Groaning abstractly, he fumbled with his forelegs in the air, and then gave up, keeling over to the side. His gaze was met with an empty, sealed, pitch black flask.

With an absent whimper, he lifted it into the air with what little magic his ravaged head could muster, unsealed it, and sucked on. Nothing sensible appeared to be able to restart the engine, so the royal stallion had found a way of coping.

“Blueblood… Prince— Prince Blublood, sir, okay, no, don’t—” a female voice from some meters above spoke to him in exasperation. “Oh for crying out loud, you’re going to choke yourself like that.”

Forcefully, the flask was torn off his snout, spilling fragrant bourbon all over him and his suit. Another series of rumbles halted the conversation for a good half a minute, as he was repeatedly hit on the head by other flasks like the one withdrawn - some filled, some not.

“Well, perhaps that would be for the better,” he moaned out as soon as the quakes halted. “A fitting — hic! — end.”

“I beg you, if you plan to commit suicide, you don’t have to tie your alcoholism into that,” the female voice mumbled out, audibly covered somewhat by a hoof. Its owner hopped down from the bunk above Blueblood’s to the floor, swiveling rampantly for the first few seconds after having done so.

The white unicorn mare with her mane done into a thick dark bun, half-piece glasses sliding downards off the sweaty snout, walked up to the tall, big, sterling white, golden-locked stallion sprawled on the ground. She was somewhat groomed and occasionally touched up, if only by herself - and he had the characteristic pinkish flesh hue and eye wander of someone who still thought that a hangover was best fought with what caused it.

As the Prince whimpered in faint defiance, he was put back onto his four hooves. The next second, he found a cushion on the round sofa in the middle of the cabin to sink his face into, kneeling down hard enough to effectively have fallen again. The mare rubbed her forehead vigorously.

“Prince Blueblood. We have to talk about your drinking problem.”

“Hm dhnt hmvh mh dmhrhnknhg phmblm,” the lump of drunken flesh, its mouth and eyes covered by a luxurious cushion, its head covered by a pair of formerly hooficured hooves, responded dispassionately.

Eyes half closed, the mare tugged on the stallion’s collar, struggling to turn him over so that he may face the cabin’s firefly light.

“Come on. Wake up, wake up. Rise and shine,” she insisted, swatting him on the face with her hoof very lightly, a few times.

“I don’t want to,” Blueblood replied with a choked sob, and had his hoof hit as well, when it started to reach for another flask. “I don’t want to, Raven. No, no, no, you can’t make me.”

“Prince Blueblood… sir… Come on, I beg you, get yourself together. You don’t want to come back to Equestria only to have to be treated for alcoholism.”

“No, I do want to go back to Equestria!” the Prince mumbled meekly, raising a hoof in indignance.

“That was not the… Nevermind. Please, sir, you can’t be like that. It’s only been three days,” Raven continued to negotiate with him, sitting down on her hunches in front of the large unicorn. She attempted to look him in the eyes, but they were so close to being shut that it was unseemly.

“Three?” he raised an eyebrow slowly, and a hoof, though that appeared to have just been a twitch. “I… Hic! I thought we’ve been here for… a week.”

“Well, we were going rather fast, the vehicle overperformed itself, an entire day’s worth of terrain in five hours. And then… we’ve only been here for three days!” the mare smiled at having seemingly found something positive in the situation.

“Three days. Stuck in this — hic! — dreadful, corrupted valley. We’re no more than eight miles from the blasted city. And we will never get any further, Raven. We will all — hic! — die here,” Blueblood droned solemnly, weakly wiping away tears from his bloodshot, blurry eyes. “The blizzard never ends. The wights, the dreadful wights, they will slip in through the cracks — hic! — the cracks! And overwhelm us all. None shall find us,” the Prince halted his tongue-tied tirade to burp with the threat of releasing past meals, but restrained his body for the time. “None shall find us but the unfortunate, damned souls who venture this far into the North.”

“Prince Blueblood, sir, we are eight miles away from their city. I’m sure they’ll come looking for us.” Raven shrugged.

“Raven, Raven… I haven’t seen happier northfolk than when we announced our leave. They’ll — hic! — pretend we never existed. Just like they did on all the meetings. Just like everyone always does. Hic!” the stallion pulled up a handkerchief and blew his nose several times in a row. “We don’t exist. We’re all paper, Raven.”

Sighing deeply, the mare examined the scent of the alcohol that the Prince had been consuming ever since the stash had been found. None of the crew confessed as to whose it was, although clearly it was meant to be smuggled to the locals for a hefty price. The Prince diligently withdrew the package of over a hundred inconspicuous flasks, and had had it in these ViP quarters since then. He started drinking roughly one day before their entrance to the Northern capital.

She knew a thing or two about chemistry. What he had been drinking - at first from time to time, and now like water - was more than reason enough for her to only react to the speech with a sigh. The mare was more than glad to do so, feeling a heavy knot postpone its bursting inside her chest.

“I don’t want to stay. I want to — hic! — run away! I… I have been thinking - what if this is an assassination? They knew we would never return. They send us here on this untested, infernal vehicle, and expect us to cross the Frozen North twice over! Open your eyes, this — hic! — this is a conspiracy!” he raised a vigorously limp hoof, while Raven struggled to tear off a chunk of ice from the recently malfunctioning refrigerator unit, and pack it up.

Choosing words carefully, she reassured the Prince:

“It’s okay, sir. Nobody would want you dead,” the mare hushed the crying, drooling, burping, hiccupping unicorn, pressing an ice package against his head.

“No, Raven,” he answered her quietly. “Nobody would.” Blueblood fell silent.

Perhaps, spending the days stuck in the snow via consuming their soon-to-be only sources of bodily heat and caring for the consumer respectively were not the best courses of actions. That said, Blueblood, this being his first political mission entirely of his own and under his control, had precisely no idea how to do much aside from look groomed, smile charmingly, and nod - and Raven, having clear, exact orders on what her task included, could only watch as the technicians in the second wagon tried to revive the engine. Her place was with Blueblood, and Blueblood was, indeed, shortly to turn blue at the rate he was going.

“Can’t it just start… Just start by itself, and we’d have one less problem…” the secretary spoke in a quiet exhale, no less frustrated at the state of things than the Prince. Her eyes passed over a window that showed nothing but bits of snow and complete darkness. Six hours past noon, and it was already dark. Perhaps, for the best. The Frozen North was not exactly invigorating to look at, and that was for Raven, who, in managing many projects, had been all over the continent.

The Prince nearly escaped her grasp and gripped a flask, but before she was able to react, both of them keeled over, moaning. A stark headache came over her, causing the mare to kneel, eyes shut, and a light thump emitted throughout the stallion’s head, the rest of the aching drowned by the many, many drinks. For a long several seconds, breathing was difficult, and Raven stared at the murderously drunk Prince as he looked up at the ceiling and mouthed a short sentence.

“We’re all paper, Raven,” she heard his near emotionless, considerably coherent whisper. He stared intensely at nothing in particular somewhere in the entry door’s general direction.

For a fraction of a moment, it felt as if something tangible, yet untouchable passed through their cabin, swirling slightly, reddish in hue.

“...we’d have one less problem…” the secretary’s unnaturally dull voice brushed against Blueblood’s audial sense, before being drowned away by the thump and the blur.

The very next second, the mare was thrown hard against the refrigerator unit, nearly knocking out the ViP food stored in there. The Prince was launched upwards, yelping quietly, and landing halfways on the sofa, only hitting half of his limbs in the fall. The characteristic hum of the supposedly extremely reliable chargers filled the air.

Previously covered in the thick darkness of the late night, the windows now showed how a heavy volley of flame erupted from the sides of their vehicle, burning away some of the thick snow and ice, illuminating the high walls of the canyon-like valley. She was just about to decide whether to panic or not, but then, the cabin had begun to shake again. Only… differently.

Recovering from the packet of frozen up genuine article vegetarian cotton candy that hit her on the head, Raven only realized what had happened when muffled yells sounded out from the main cabin in the next section of the carrier. It now made sense how the shaking had stopped all of a sudden, a fact the mare blissfully accepted as the norm before then.

“Prince Blueblood, sir, we’re moving!” a thickly coated purple earth pony in a flappy-eared hat, bearing bushy mutton chops on his snout, bursted into their cabin to announce the news. “She’s going! Outta nowhere, up and went off! We’re home free, everyone!” He spun around in so saying, almost chasing his tail, talking both to the partly unconscious, weeping stallion, and to the dozen technicians that shared the journey, albeit located in a much less luxurious quarter. “Take that, you stupid frozen wasteland! Ungh!” For the last shout of victory, he turned to the side, facing the side of the ribcage-like valley wall, and made a vulgar sign towards the ancient formation.

Perhaps too excited to wait for the plainly staring unicorn to respond, the head of the engineering team left and shut the entrance to the ViP cabin. The machine now shook much more consistently, less grappling with its passengers in a fight to the death, more rocking them to sleep all too excitedly. The boney-looking walls now moved sideways, a welcome sight.

It was certainly looking up for their road of no less than one thousand miles to Equestria proper.

“Do you see? There’s never any need to lose hope like that. We’ll be home before long,” the mare assured the other unicorn in the room, still swiveling a bit after the experience. “It’s all… gonna be okay.” Her hoof rushed to cover her mouth as her chest grumbled, perturbed all too much by the odorous smell of the recently alcoholic Prince, the new, constant, more drilling shaking, and the peculiar, worrying residual presence in her horn and head. “Gonna be okay!” she squeaked out in a muffled, final morale reinstater, having secluded herself in the private restroom in the corner of the room.

Prince Blueblood merely scowled, dropping tear after tear on the ground, the bright red flash still alive in his barely seeing eyes. His mind was not exactly a picture of stability - indeed, it was a storming sea of this and that, but regardless, it definitely felt off to him that the news of their progress in not dying horribly... moved him rather little.

The rest of the Frozen North would await, primarily unmapped, rarely recorded in any books, normally ignored by the general populace - which included Blueblood, despite his denial - and cold. They got there in just about a week, and nobody they told so believed them. What fairytale boogie creatures reportedly inhabited the vast frozen area, they only saw faint shadows and suggestions of, plowing through the snow in the pinkish, rainbow-ish, larger than life, parade float-like digntary vehicle.

“Nothing I say — hic! — ever matters,” he stated to himself, exhaling a fume the smell of which would easily knock one of his proper stature out. “I’m…” the stallion raised his head, staring right at the empty observation hole in the metal door of the bright, colorful, apparently unstable snowplower. “I’m a paper prince.”

Something troubling moved in his thoughts as he said so... but it quickly turned out that raising his head in such condition was an abhorrent idea, and he fell back down onto the cushion, moaning loudly in pain, grasping for more bourbon.

Day Six: Ravenous Animals

DAY SIX

Prince Blueblood, withdrawing from his recently discovered alcohol addiction, and painfully sober, scowled with rampant indignance, hurling hard objects and insults at the ceiling. Raven was knocking on the entry door that separated their cabin from the main maintenance/housing area, with little luck. Their cabin was in relative order, discounting the persisting spiritual residue and Blueblood’s projectiles. At the very least, it rocked lightly and let in the lulling magical hum from the outside, which both of them knew was an improvement.

That said, the evident, much harsher rocking had been troubling both of them for the past few minutes.

And for the past few seconds, the distinctive sounds of claw scraping against metal were causing them a small amount of panic.

“QUIT IT AT ONCE!” yelled the withdrawal-suffering stallion, coat pale and eyes bloodshot, at the incessant, rabid sounds above. “YOU’RE BEING ORDERED! CAN YOU EVEN HEAR ME?”

Raven had picked up a small statue of the sun that the Prince launched at the mostly innocent ceiling bars, using it to hammer on the metal door.

“I suggest you say that to the crew!” she attempted to keep neutral in wishing for him to simply keep quiet. “It’s like they’ve all gone deaf!”

“You…” the stallion took a breath and a cough to recharge for another tirade. “YOU DERANGED DEBAUCHERS! HEARTLESS HOOLIGANS! I’M AN EQUESTRIAN PRINCE! AN ACTUAL PRINCE, OKAY? I HAVE DOCUMENTS! ARE YOU—”

Blueblood had ran out of lexical capacity and proceeded with roaring and growling. Raven, in the meantime, had ran out of patience, and took to hammering a crystal plate not far from the restroom instead. They both ended up succeeding, in one way or another, and neither’s success made them feel any better.

The Prince’s guttural attempts at domination made it alarmingly clear that he was not the only one making such noises - what they thought was the Equestrian banner flapping especially hard, combined with the exhaust pipes passing magic dust again, was more… in origin. Raven, having managed to extract a formerly-pristine-now-accidentally-hammered crystal periscope, took a glance at what it was on their roof that caused so much ruckus. Before the mare’s jaw dropped fully, the large, no less than three square ponies in size (three in width, three in length, and three in height), wolf-like creature clawed at the oculus. Even in that faint glimpse, Raven counted at least four of them on the roof.

“You… ANIMALS! YOU ARE ANIMALS!” the stallion conceded, his throat unable to express rage for that long. Not continuously, at any rate.

“Prince Blueblood, sir, it’s…” Raven’s distraught worry deepened as she realized that not even with her knowledge of the wildlife of faraway lands could she tell what species this was. “It’s wolves!”

“Wolves?!” the Prince reflectively checked left and right, eyes growing far larger than they were to begin with.

“Yes!”

For a few seconds, the two officials stared at each other. Then, both of them rushed to the door, and rammed it, trying again to get the other cabin’s attention. After that failed, both of them, without verbal coordination, yelled and unleashed two streams of sparks at the door, one much brighter and less wavy than the other. A bright flash overcame the two unicorns, and both looked hopefully at what remained of the door.

The door remained in its entirety, badly bent in one area, and barely grazed in the other.

“That was supposed to melt even fosvare!” the secretary glared at the deep mark.

“Uh… Yes, that it was!” Blueblood nodded, passing a glance at the smaller one.

“No, no, this can’t be for real… the one time they make something properly…” Raven held her hoof by her temple, speaking out of the corner of her mouth, staring at the floor intensely.

The Prince trotted nervously around the room, passing by a large chest full of flasks, filled and not. He was just about to swing it open, but a thought halted him.

“Wait! I just realized,” the stallion nearly shone. “If we couldn’t blast through something as simple as the door, then how is this presumptious pack of wolves to claw through the ceiling? We’ve nothing to fear, they’ll tire soon enough, and we’ll be on our way in peace!”

Raven’s face curved, eyebrows furrowing and closing onto one another, eyes wading off, as if caught having to confess to someone that their Hearth’s Warming presents came from their parents at best.

Before she gathered the strength to say it, and before the stallion, overtaken by his own brilliance, could continue, a thunderous crack emitted from above. Then another, and then another, in quick succession, they were then followed by sounds of metal being bound, and magic dust dropping on the floor in piles.

“Blueblood,” the mare spoke, shaking her head slowly, staring with realization on the sparkling dust dropping down. “Never, NEVER assume anything to work for you in an Equestrian design.”

The Prince was looking up and down, stepping back and into the wall, mouth open. Loud, dedicated grunting came from up above.

“They never plan for anything.”

He saw Raven lift up the small sun statue she used to bang on the door, commit blasphemy by hitting it against the wall and breaking off a part of the weak stone, and leave a sharp stub of what used to be a magnificent orb. Before he could droop his ears in silence for lack of anything meaningful to say on the matter, the loudest crack of them all saw the room grow colder in an instant. Wailing winds, errant tiny icicles, and many snowflakes launched themselves in the stallion’s face. A reeking far outweighing his own attempts to sober up came onto them, accompanied by no less than four huge shapes.

They were, indeed, wolf-like, and positively immense. Light grey fur, razor-sharp even at sight, fangs with multiple tips, plain white claws, and massive yellow-and-black eyes. Only three of them fit into the room through the crack, and the last was left swiping a forepaw, biting the air in exasperation, as he got stuck in the admittedly small hole they had made. One remained standing atop the pedestal on the round sofa, another stepped down right in front of Blueblood, and the third just sat down on the cushions, scratching the humped back.

It was little consolation as the one Blueblood had been staring at, slowly losing track of what he willed to whom when he was making budget and possession reaccounting five years back, stood up on his back paws. Although wolves were quadrupeds - not that the Prince was too sure of that, or anything much, in his state - these clearly possessed the body structure to stand straight, as well as crawl. Somewhat peculiar of a creature, he realized (or the small part of him that did not consider suicide after seeing the monster brush thick lines of metal off its claws). Better yet, this one seemed to be paler and larger than the rest.

“Equeshtrrriansh,” the wolf creature growled, blinking at the Prince. “Rrrare.

“What?..” the stallion whimpered, eyes widening, various parts of the mind battling to not be in control when its owner was mauled to death.

“Dun shee you offen. Norrrmally,” — the apparently talking wolf tilted his head — “Thickcoatsh inshtead.”

“Northern locals,” Raven’s drained voice elaborated. She stood staring at the wolf on the sofa, who eyed her just the same, and her facial expression had trouble deciding between primal terror, natural curiosity, and a variety of other, less identifiable feelings. The sharp-edged statue fell on the floor, missing a good chunk of it. The wolf she stared at was rubbing his chest, picking out stone dust with a look of annoyance on his face.

“And… uh… to what do we owe?” Blueblood asked the giant talking bipedal wolf thing.

“Gun eat you. Obvioushly. Jush currrioush.” It shrugged.

“No you’re not,” the Prince stated, staring right at the wolf. Idiocy had lost in the battle of the mind.

“What.”

“Get out. I order you. I’m an Equestrian Prince. I’m not going to be eaten by some rampant wolf freaks.”

“Parrrdon? the creature tilted its head even further, squinting at the apparently suicidal stallion. He stared back at the gobsmacked predator, and turned to open the chest, uncork a flash, and down the entirety of its contents. It took Blueblood about five seconds to gulp the whole thing down, and release a breath of raging spiritual fumes right at the wolves, who stood in the opening, slowly filled by snow and sparkling dust.

“Get out,” the pony raised a commanding hoof, not yet fully shaking, but definitely much more in-tune now that he was back to step one for the end of his existence. A loud, raged roar was his answer, and the stallion’s last reflex was to lunge at the thing, aiming for it with his horn.

“SHPARRRKLESH!!!” a much higher pitched growl came from above, where the fourth wolf was stuck, right next to a few leaking pipes. A loud booming, hissing sound came over the ViP cabin.

Soon, everything took on a higher pitch, and became a quartet of panicked howling. Blueblood was quite surprised to count himself among the living, clearly feeling his horn nearly bend against the thick coat. His face hurt all over, cut by the fur in many places, and his suit was a mess. Worse yet, the headache came uncalled for- the immense loudness of the screams was not fit for his ears.

It was after having considered all that on his way back from supposed death, that he realized he was on fire.

“FIRE,” Blueblood stated squeakily, staring at the sleeve of his suit being danced over by bluish flames.

The roaring had turned into howling, and was much, much further away now - the crack had became a touch bigger, and no towering wolf things were in sight. Below the crack, the cabin was also on fire.

Amazingly calm for someone who just drank a whole flask of bourbon, attacked an undocumented sentient wolf weaponless, and then was set on fire, Blueblood stared at Raven staring at the whole picture. It took her about two seconds to take it in, run to the restroom, and emerge with a small, pink, sparkly fire extinguisher. The mare shook it in the air, and released a wave of bluish dust. An incredibly loud sizzling sound came over the room, and the fire was gone. Just in time, Blueblood realized, as the smell of burnt mane was now almost clearly among the odors.

“Are you okay, sir? Did they hurt you, h-how bad is the burn, do we—” Raven’s eye twitched as she shot questions at him, shaking in place herself, shuddering from the cold and the snow landing on her back.

“I’m fine,” Blueblood replied, slowly, monotonously, biting his lower lip till it bled, mostly by accident. “What did you do?”

“I, uh… It was y-y-you, sir. It… it turns out, they used the ca-capacitor dust that had to have been decom-m-mmissioned years ago,” the secretary shook a little, stuttering, albeit somewhat calmed by being lulled into having to explain things to ponies ranking higher than her. “It’s… It’s inflammatory when coming in con-nnntact with alcohol, in a... any capacity.”

“Ah,” the Prince stared at her, slowly feeling that his face was quite cut up, his suit was singed, and bits of his flesh clearly caught some of the fire. He processed the pain, but not the panic to come from it. “Wonderful.”

As he said so, the entry door was rammed in, and their cabin was instantly filled by technicians. Overtaken by panic, they looked first at the hole in the ceiling, and then at their ViPs.

Raven turned to them before their head could say anything, and reported:

“It’s over. We’ve dealt with the threat. P-please, install an opening valve on our side.”

It was only when she caught the definite suggestion of mixed confusion and irritation that her eyes went over the bit of the main cabin. It was full of burst pipes, also on fire, and no less than three bodies of the same wolves lay motionless, charring in place. A much bigger hole was in their ceiling as well. Only some of the screeching the machinery produced was audible through the knocked down door, the rest of the main cabin covered in impeccable soundproof plating. So as not to trouble the ViPs’ sleep.

“I did something useful,” Blueblood stated out of his corner, having already downed three more flasks of bourbon in that time.

“...we’re just glad you’re fine,” the head engineer brushed a hoof across his moustache, and shook his head, looking at the damage all over again. There were claw marks on his clothes, and at least half of his comrades were covered in abominably dark blood.

Once again, their journey was to take a pause.

Day Seven: Stranger

DAY SEVEN

Prince Blueblood sat on a curled up coat, a much thicker one draped over his shoulders, above another, even thicker coat. He blinked tiredly, staring at the plain bonfire that illuminated the old, ruined wall. Occasionally, urged by reflex, he would brush a hoof against the cuts and burns on his face, and sigh sorrowfully. Perhaps the one good thing in this dreadful state of affairs was that his face-touching ceased leaving patches of colorful antiseptic on his hooves and clothes. Then again, they were stained as could be by then, no matter how often Raven told him not to touch the wounds.

They had relocated to a gracefully convenient ruined tower close to where the attack had happened. The technicians, after having taken a short while to confirm that his injuries were not lethal, and then making sure he would not hurt himself further anyway, spent the rest of the shrinking day to compile a damage round-up and get to fixing their transport.

Although the report was completed, Blueblood knew not a word of it, no matter how many times Raven offered to tell him. He instantly forbade her from notifying him of repair progress, and was more than glad to set up camp somewhere separate from where the repairs were taking place. So he sat in his and Raven’s place of refuge, on the second to last level of the watch tower, where the old walls protected from the wind and cold still. The Prince made a point of not going anywhere near windows, and barely moved from his corner throughout the entirety of their being there. Even when the secretary urged him to at least take part in setting up the Equestrian flag, torn but intact, atop the watchtower, so that other souls may be drawn to assist, he refused.

It was all too obvious that they were all going to die, and he wanted not a peek of their hopeless endeavors. That would be too much for his strained psyche and battered organism. The royal stallion intended to perish in relative peace of mind, and not in despair over the hopelessness of the situation. Therefore, he sat by the fire for hours, staring hopelessly into the dancing sparks, and only occasionally moaning or whimpering - be it from the continuing alcohol withdrawal, the mouth burns his drinking last time gave him, the tingling cuts on his face, the burns on his chest, or plain despondency.

Raven, glancing back at the nearly immobile stallion, sighed and pulled a small gold-encrusted tube out of her own coat. Furrowing her brow and examining the unsteady stairs up, she took her chance with knocking on the solid wall instead. Whether the sound roused Blueblood up or not, she could barely tell, glasses covered by snowflakes every time she wiped them manually.

“Prince Blueblood? Sir?” she called out, waving her foreleg to make sure there was some chance to be noticed. “I will be going up for a short while. Call out to me if anything happens, please.”

A particularly sobby and drawn out sigh was the reply.

“And would you want to be told if anything of note is on the horizon?”

Whether the silence was solemn or simply a sign of him not paying attention, she could not tell. This being more of a professional courtesy, Raven saw little loss in leaving the conversation as it was, and ascended carefully to where centuries ago, overwatch would take up post.

After a few minutes of adjusting to the furious winds and the sudden blinding glimmer of the snow, the secretary found her footing, and approached a stone railing. The most optimal time for any sort of observation was when the sun was just about to reach its peak - and luckily, she caught just the moment. The white barrens opened up for at least a mile or so from there, only errant snowflakes meddling with the vision. From a former outer torch slot, the Equestrian flag hung, turned upside down, to signal an emergency. Raven still felt rather… tingly about it, her experience with the North and in general speaking out against marking their position with a large colorful banner. So far, she assumed that it was of little consequence, what with the black and blue smoke constantly emitting from their transport, which was also quite a landmark in and of itself. A temporary one, she hoped.

Having taken in a breath for stability, and casting a very small impact prevention spell on both the miniature telescope and her glasses, so as to be able to see, Raven set up to look around.

The view would easily have been breathtaking in the figurative sense, had it not been just that in the literal. Harsh winds, dreary landscapes - such pictures caused troubling thoughts for most ponies. Thankfully, Raven, after having served as Celestia’s personal secretary, overseer, and more, was not necessarily most ponies.

And so she saw many a point of interest. The white wastes were not all waste, and not all white. Far to the east from their location, there were copious poignant, curved shapes, with hints of vast hills, and shadowy objects, similar in shape to the ruin they occupied. Down south, there was a steep fall, and what little was visible from what the snowflakes did not obscure in their fall would indicate that it was a forest - staunch evergreens, growing thickly, evidently looking to test how well their carrier fared against such cumbersome objects. Ever so faintly, Raven saw the shape of the tall mountain that marked the end of Equestria and the beginning of the Frozen North, a border city they avoided on the way in. By her calculations, it would be their current goal.

Then, from where they came - to the northwest - the valley became much more of a signature sight, looking as if some large beast’s ribcage had been placed on the ground, pointing upwards. The terrain was the plainest there, with only a few rocks here and there - discounting the massive, walled-off capital city, glaring at the Equestrian border with the massive banner even she could see. Straight west was an area that perturbed her somewhat, as the telescope would reliably lose the spell and immediately be cluttered with snow the moment she attempted to look at it. Several tries in, Raven gave up, and decided not to question it. Much like she did with the many, many shambling shapes seen close and far.

There may very well have been a very good reason why the Frozen North was not a popular subject in Equestria. In truth, it could easily rival the Everfree Forest when it came to untamed magic, dangerous creatures, and vast expanses of death. Everfree was much more well-known and popularized, thankfully so - that wild magic zone was nearly right below Canterlot. This place, though… As curious and adventures as ponies could get, Raven, a specific individual, did not feel overly inclined to be that acquainted with whatever inhabited it. Blueblood would certainly back that mindset up.

Although, as the unicorn aimed her telescope down, it began to look as if the North had little intention to ask.

“Dammit,” she cursed to herself, glancing at the carrier being repaired not far from their location - but far enough for whatever she saw to look at them first.

It was a figure, bigger than a pony, and built differently, limping through the snow, the snowfall evidently filling up the prints. Unfortunately, her observation tool was made less for detail and more for distanced outline, so all she could tell was that it did not look right and that it was looking their way. They stared at one another for some time - then, Raven realized that it was not her, a tiny pony head atop a five-story tower, the one below was looking at, but at the upturned flag.

“Dammit.”

“Hello?” came a voice from below. Raven’s ears perked up. She stumbled between not replying and staying, not replying and running away, not replying and running away with Blueblood, and replying.

“Identify yourself!” she screamed down, trying to squint so as to see who the dark patch below their tower was.

The figure stopped for a moment. Instantly, the pony thought that it could have been a mimic creature - amorphous beings that existed in the most dangerous corners of the world, they took shapes with which they could confuse predators and prey both, turning them into their meal instead. However, as the stranger below moved, standing on two legs and stretching out large wings, the theory was thrown away. Mimics could not copy griffon anatomy well enough to stand up.

That was a griffon, Raven put the pieces together. The voice sounded screechy and had an accent to it, and the quadrupedal stance looking strange was owed to how the avian was hurt - standing up, he immediately had to grasp his stomach with a hand. And then he answered:

“I… can’t! Can we talk inside? It’s not very nice out here!” Raven listened closer - a High Griffon accent, too melodic, trouble pronouncing the “r” sound, some wrong accents. Quite young, only just out of his teenage years. Male, obviously.

“I will go down and see you first,” she put down an ultimatum, considering for a moment to holler at the workers first, so as to have safety in numbers. Eventually, her less suspicious side won over, doubting the possibility that a griffon, probably a noble, and pretty much a teen at that, would be leading an ambush.

In her descend, she was unnoticed by the Prince. Blueblood had by then curled up and was touching his belly apathetically, evidently suffering from being left without his only solace yet again. Passing a few other more flights, Raven left the building, immediately seeing a technician by the door.

“There a problem?” the purple moustached stallion asked, pointing toward the stranger.

“No, not currently. Thanks for the concern,” Raven assured him, glancing at the avian, who did not move since they last exchanged shouts. He even kept the one hand he could keep up, up.

“Well, if anything happens…”

“I remember. Thank you.”

Trotting up quickly, she examined the griffon closer. He was… a curious sight.

“Are we done? I don’t like it out here,” the stranger spoke as calmly as he could, clearly in discomfort. There was heaviness in his breath, and he had to open his beak far more often than seemed reasonable.

He was a bald eagle, and indeed barely out of his teen years. Hints of a small moustache above his beak, messy, formerly groomed wings, tail wrapped around one of his legs.

What was curious, however, was what he wore. The griffon adorned ceremonial armor, something rarely seen outside their own royal halls, or political meetings. Once picture-perfect, the chestpiece, pauldrons, vambraces and greaves, they looked bleak, worn, torn. The brown and red of the cloth and metal were closer in shades now. Not from battle, but from simple wear and tear. Few, if any, knockoffs were ever made, and real ones could take millennia to even begin to look unpolished. Raven knew as much from own experience.

She could not dwell on it for too much longer, as their sudden guest clearly would prefer to be lead inside. Something did give her thoughts about his face and the “G” insignias on the armor, but the memory of that was rather faint. The Frozen North, still, was a place of enough mystery for this to likely be the norm.

“Yes… Yes, we are. Come in, quickly, it’s dangerous out here,” the secretary ushered him in, opening the door for the limping griffon.

“Yeah, thanks, I know,” he answered. She furrowed her brow for a bit, but then let that slide harmlessly, as Equestrian evidently was not his first language.

“We’ve set up camp on the fourth floor. Can you go up stairs?” Raven doubted letting him stay where Blueblood was, at the same time wishing to do just that. The latter drive won over, as the Prince was becoming more and more of a burden by the hour. Not that a positive effect was guaranteed, but it would be a change.

“I think, yeah,” the griffon winced, still grasping his stomach, at the bottom of where the huge chestpiece was. Walking behind him, Raven saw that his kit was complete with a ceremonial cape - only instead of dragging behind him, it was wrapped around his stomach, forming a knot at the side. Much like his tail, still wrapped tight around one of his legs. Helpful for her to not be swatted, but yet, he kept cradling what must have been a rather grievous wound. In addition, she could almost tell she used to know the signs on the armor.

One thing that definitely seemed surprising was that even limping, the stranger produced little to no sound in stepping as he ascended. Not to be racist, Raven could not help but feel a bit jealous for how griffons were born predators. He heaved, having clear trouble breathing, and yet his step was virtually inaudible. This was likely to be the norm for them, she assumed, her experience with their kind being limited - her area of expertise was mostly Equestrian backwaters and borderline tribal creatures of the East and South. Not the northwestern Griffon Empire.

“Prince Blueblood? We have a guest,” she announced loudly, hoping for the Prince to tune into more of… a Prince, now that they had a public relations situation on them.

Regardless of her hopes, the first one to examine the surroundings and call out was the griffon.

“This looks good. I can stay, yes, right?” He turned to Raven rather than the stallion who just eyed him, less of a stare and more of a lazy glance.

“I… suppose so. You don’t look very good.” She walked up to Blueblood, him looking at her now, reacting not at all otherwise. “Prince Blueblood, sir, would you know if we have any analgetic left?”

“Prince, huh,” the griffon spoke under his breath, his heaving masking that well enough.

The Prince took a long inhale and shut his eyes. Then, he limply tapped on the pockets of his coats. Eventually, much to Raven’s surprise, a small vial was extracted from one of them.

“Not that it matters any, not at all,” he spoke with a crack in his voice, these being his first words in at least four hours.

“We’ll see about that. Let me see—”

The griffon, who was until then eyeing Blueblood constantly, shuddered at the sight of the vial, and stepped back rapidly. At that angle, with the bonfire lighting him up from below, something panged once the mare tossed a look his way.

“No! No, no need! Can’t. Will heal by itself. No problem.” He nearly erupted into panic breathing as he spoke, but still nearly managed to keep his calm.

“Are you sure about that? You look very hurt,” Raven tried to reason with what looked to be another royalty member showcasing his quirks. At least this one spoke.

“Sure. I… Thanks for the offering, but I am fine like that. I just need rest. Can I sit by the fire?”

“Prince Blueblood? Can he sit by the fire? It’s your choice.” Raven nudged him slightly, still hoping that his post-traumatic apathy would come to an end.

“So be it,” the stallion spoke with a sigh.

And so, the wounded stranger joined them. They conversed for some time, Raven becoming more and more shaken up as they spoke.

It appeared that this griffon himself had no idea how he came to be lost in the frozen wilderness, wearing ceremonial armor, and wounded. He could not even name himself - traumatic amnesia, Raven assumed, though he did not seem to have visible cranial injuries. According to him, he was roaming for long - but then, he had no way of knowing how long that truly was, as days and nights were all confused. He tried his best to be courteous to the Equestrian Prince and his aide, unwillingly doing all he could to further his part in her attempt to revive Blueblood somewhat. At the same time, she decided not to ask him about the strange feeling she had about some of his appearance.

“Can I ask why you are here? No need to detail, just curious. Don’t want to seek out political secrets, but would be nice to know. In general.” The griffon only came to that question after some basic pleasantries - in particular, making sure that they would not offer him much to eat (nothing they had would sate him, anyway), and that he would not linger long.

“Why we’re here?” Blueblood sighed. “Because I’m a failure of a Prince, that is why.”

“Pardon?” the avian lifted his brow. The stallion shuddered and perked his ears up upon hearing that, and then, some deep breaths later, calmed slightly. “Um… Problem?”

“No, no, no, nothing. Bad memory,” the multi-coated unicorn assured him.

“We’ve ran into some trouble before. That’s why we’re stranded here, in fact. Oh! Prince Blueblood, why don’t you tell our guest of how you saved us?” Raven did all she could to pull the strings.

“Saved us?! You— what? Raven, in case you had not considered, that was the single grimmest moment of my life! Perhaps you never noticed, but I could clearly, clearly see the last of my dignity burn away with the fire that consumed my flesh, LIKE THE RAVENOUS—” the stallion took a bit to cough, not used to talking, let alone yelling, so much, “—BEAST THAT I HAD BECOME!”

“Ouah…” their guest scratched his forehead, not finding many words in reply.

“This… this… This, this is what you call saving us?! No, Raven, this is CONDEMNING us. I have lost all my dignity, I am no longer a Prince. I am now nothing. I am not even half a nothing, which is all I was before. Nothing! Nothing at all!” Blueblood turned to tears by the end of his tirade, while the griffon looked at Raven with plain confusion.

“He’s not been the same since we got stranded,” she explained quickly. Then, her attention turned to someone who clearly required it. “Come now, sir… How was you saving us from a pack of savage wolves anything but a noble act? I honestly can’t say I follow your logic.”

“Wolves?” the griffon asked surprisedly, looking to Raven, and then Blueblood. “Him?..” he added more quietly.

“You can’t? Of course you can’t, you don’t understand, you wouldn’t. Raven, Raven… I fought. I lunged, I hit, I tried to stab, I set them on fire - with my breath!” The griffon was slowly opening his mouth more and more. “I suffered cuts! Beats! I WAS SET ON FIRE, AND THERE ARE MARKS TO SHOW IT!” Blueblood, in the meantime, turned his head so that the relatively small burn on his neck would be visible. “What SORT of PRINCE am I?”

“A good one?” the griffon suggested plainly.

“NO! No, the sun and moon be damned, no! Can’t you see? Don’t you know?” Blueblood stared at them. “I’ve lost my grace. I am not untouched anymore. I am roughed, I am tarnished, I’ve been HIT. I am no longer of ANY. USE. You may as well throw me away. What use is a Prince whose face is scarred? What use is a Prince who lifted a hoof against an enemy? What use? What do I do now?!”

“Um… Prince Blueblood…” Raven had no idea where to begin.

“Auh, is that not what Princes do? They lead armies, they fight for their country? No?” The griffon, an amnesiac to begin with, was evidently starting to have his mind collapse.

“No! I am far, far, far above that! We are not a militaristic nation, and I am not a militaristic Prince - I have not hit a thing in my life! Me fighting a wolf? I am a disgrace to be talking of it to you.”

“So… a good prince… is a prince that is dead,” the griffon concluded while Raven smothered her face with her hoof.

“...YES! In my situation, at any rate. Now? Now, I am no Prince, and if I am no Prince, I have no worth - and if I have no worth, what point is there to my life? What do I do? Be an exile, wander the lands?” Blueblood waved his hooves in the air for further effect, clearly more fueled up than the mare ever wanted him to be. With good intentions…

“You can… find a job. Do something! If you fought off a wolf, maybe you are a fighter? You could try the mili…” before the fuming stallion launched another tirade, the griffon raised a talon into the air. “Wait! Wait, I remember! I… I think I’m from the military!”

“Well, that’s good,” Raven tacked on a smile, not that the news was not good. “See, sir? You just helped him regain some of his memory!”

The Prince wailed in response and covered his face with his hooves, weeping furiously.

“Do you know anyone from our army who was lost in here? I don’t know if you would know, but…” the griffon asked her, restrained, but clearly excited.

Raven looked at him, examining his face. She blinked a few times, and for a spare second, her irises grew large. The mare opened her mouth, and then closed it, quickly looking sideways, causing the avian a bit of discomfort. Almost catching a thought, the mare clearly brought up what the sign on his armor meant.

“I wouldn’t know… but I think I know where exactly you used to serve. Look at the sign on your armor, does it look familiar to you, can you remember it yourself?” the pony tried to move his memory by itself, knowing it was beneficial for amnesiacs. He stared at the curvy “G”, but nothing came of it.

“No, I don’t know.”

“It’s okay. This is the sign of the Imperial Guard Elite. You are the royal guard, whoever you are,” she said, almost speaking with a bit of pride for the griffon. “And from what I can tell from the armor… You are an Elite.”

That this was not an ordinary griffon, and not an ordinary griffon soldier, was becoming apparent to begin with, but now it came together. She lit up a little - even with Blueblood misbehaving, the sheer public relations boost repairing an Imperial Guard Elite’s memory would give…

“Oh. Oh! Hah.” The soldier chuckled, cut short by a wince, going back to cradling his stomach again.

“Did you remember your name?” Raven asked hopefully.

“Ah, no. I just realized - me and this guy, we are similar. I know now, in social standing, an Elite is a lot like your nobles. A Prince is not quite a Princess, but we should have something in common. Maybe if he had better opportunities, we would.”

“Alas…” Raven replied with a sigh, glad that something was going right. Yet, her heart twinged when the griffon’s head jerked in the Prince’s direction. That one had, by then, become apathetic again, slowly wiping tears and snot from his face. Only then did she realize that it was from how the stallion was babbling - the griffon’s hearing caught it first.

“Can you repeat?” he asked the Prince, doing Raven a favor.

“Wha?..”

“You just said something. Tell me what,” a sudden sternness emerged in the avian’s voice.

“I… uuhhmmm… I said… I said that if you… if you thought we could have been so similar… and that it’s good that I’m what I am now… then perhaps we could switch places, and all would be for the better.” Blueblood replied miserably.

“You would be me, and I would be you? Change bodies?” the Elite asked excitedly.

“Not that it would be much good. I am hideous now. Look at me,” the Prince said, pointing at the scratches and faint burns on his face. He was extremely lucky not to get a single deep cut. These would disappear in a week or so, and Raven told him as such, but he would not listen.

“I have been hit, too,” the griffon lightly tapped his chestpiece. “And you would take that?”

“It’s not the face, it’s not as bad.”

“So you’d change places?..”

Raven stepped back a little, raising a brow. A lot of communicational weirdnesses came from different cultures, sure, so this strange turn of events was not all that strange, perhaps. Only it felt strange to her, not just the conversation, but the... strangeness around the Elite. Something about his face still seemed off-putting. That, or, perhaps, it was xenophobia she was warned about many times while traveling abroad. Never a good time to contract that.

She stepped back a little, and produced a small crystal-looking object from her coat, looking warily at the two by the fire.

“Yes, I would! And what of it?” Blueblood pointed at the griffon indignantly.

“But you said you would rather be dead?” the soldier tilted his head, sitting up on his legs, crouching now.

“Dead, different body, anything! Not this.”

Raven’s irises largened again, and this time stayed that way.

“I can arrange that,” the griffon whispered, stretching a taloned hand to the miserable pony.

“What? How?” Blueblood whimpered in surprise.

“PRINCE BLUEBLOOD, SIR, DON’T!” the secretary screamed out, keeping her distance.

“Give me. The word,” the Elite said, heaving, hyperventilating even, rising up on his two back paws. “Say it.”

Blueblood crawled into the deep corner out of initial fear, feeling wind suddenly intensify, hard enough for the griffon’s cape to unfurl, now gliding behind his back, along with the tail. The eagle looked right at him with unblinking eyes, and pointed an index talon.

“S-say what, exactly?”

“My body is yours. Your body is mine,” he said, and his desperate breaths had turned into faint, unearthly echoes. Faint green emanated from his claw tips, wings, and eyes.

“But how are you… How are you doing this?!”

“I am Elite. We. Know. Magic. Say it.”

Raven, in the meantime, circled around the two, too afraid to reach the griffon. and trying to put together a solution. It came together.

This was a wraith. And she remembered why the face sprung into her memory.

“Prince Blueblood! Don’t listen to him,” she waved her hooves furiously, seeing the Prince’s eyes get locked with the wraith’s, and becoming greener. “Don’t! This… This is Jean’Luc de Sade, Junior! He was reported missing three months ago! He’s dead, sir, he’s dead!”

“B-but…”

“She. Is. LYING. She is superstitious. Death was never confirmed. Don’t fear. Say it,” the wraith spoke in singled out words, barely able to breathe. It made sense now why his armor was so dim, and why he would not eat, drink, or, indeed, touch any of them. Why his steps were quiet - he never stepped, his image merely advanced a trajectory. The curled up cape and tail - so as not to have them phase through solid objects. The armor, to hide the persisting injuries. Whatever killed him, it hit him in the chest.

“Never officially confirmed! We have documents and records, he was found dead at the site of the Incident at Pierce Heaven!” Raven did all she could to get Blueblood’s attention, watching the Prince’s jaw drop open slowly. “They were never released, because otherwise we’d have a war!”

“LY… ING… YOU SAID… YOU WANTED… TO BE DEAD… WHAT DOES IT… MATTER?”

They stood in silence, a green glow growing stronger and stronger. It was a green aura now, and around what used to be Jean’Luc de Sade Jr., the watchtower came to life - faint shapes of ancient artillery poked out of holes that were now sealed, strangely tall equine creatures trotted quickly back and forth, and ghastly sounds emitted all around. It grew by the seconds, bringing the tower back to life with its residue.

Raven took in air, and rushed to the stallion’s side, risking contact with the wraith circle. She had no idea if that was at all harmful, and did not want to find out.

“Don’t listen to him! We need you alive!” she began to shake the Prince.

The griffon, floating in air, heaved and coughed, outwordly echo audible in his voice.

“You. Don’t. Take me. I am better. A better Prince. You won’t remember. All will be better,” he spoke to Raven now.

She stared first at the ghostly wraith of the son of the High General of the Imperial Guard, and then at the pathetic alcoholic that had a medically recognized allergic reaction to commoner food. A brilliant soldier and politician even in his young age, and… Blueblood.

“No! No, no, no, no, no!” she screamed, mostly at herself. “Don’t! Don’t do this, Blueblood, end this, before it’s too late!”

“Do. You know. What it’s like. To be dead?” what used to be Jean’Luc de Sade Jr. stretched its arms to them, nearly pleading, switching strategies, it seemed.

“Very bad! You don’t want to find out!” Raven screeched at Blueblood.

The wraith blinked visibly, adjusting what he was going to say.

“Not bad. At all. SAY. IT.”

A tense silence was in place as the Prince lifted his head, eyes locked with the wraith’s.

Meekly, quietly, with a whimper, but audibly enough, he said:

“I don’t want to die.”

The tormented, sorrowful, truly miserable scream was heard from the tower, lasting for nearly a minute. By when the head engineer had arrived, panicked beyond belief in regards to the two ViPs’ safety, he only saw the Prince being cradled by his secretary, barely fitting into her grasp. Weird images of green energy were vaporing away through the cracks. He nearly swore as a green shade of something quadrupedal, yet with two arms atop a simian-looking upper body, galloped through him, and disappeared, bringing an end to the greens.

“What in the world happened here? Are you alright?” the gruff purple pony inquired worriedly.

Blueblood looked at him, and said, with a gulp:

“I didn’t die.”

Raven hung her head, shaking it slowly.

The repairs were done by the evening, and they set out again after an uneasy night’s sleep inside the vehicle, which looked as if no damage at all was done. Although the bourbon appeared to be missing from the ViP cabin.

Day Fourteen: Wanted

Blueblood inhaled deeply, concentrated on keeping firm hold of the object floating by his side. With trembling forehooves, he grabbed one of his gold locks. The stallion shook in place, threatening to tumble off the pillow mound located on the couch in their cabin, and breathed heavily all throughout.

Eventually, he said:

“Do it.”

He then yelped mightily as a sharp pen stabbed him right in the back, causing the stallion to lose hold of his magic, and sending the object he had been holding into motion. A quiet “chirk” and a devouring emptiness inside his stomach said that the deed was done.

“There, there. It’s alright,” Raven patted him on the back, shaking her head. She picked up the scissors and the now detached lock, and placed them in their respective places - a tightly secured locker by her shelf on the bunk, and the window, respectively.

Prince Blueblood had been having his mane made for the past week, and they were already seven locks through. In truth, the secretary was starting to suspect that something may have moved much more within the royal unicorn than it seemed at first. And at first, it seemed that his entire psyche, sanity included, move to a rather faraway land. Ever since the encounter on the seventh day of their unfortunate journey, the encounter nobody liked to bring up much, Blueblood had developed a line of new eccentricities. He ordered that he no longer be groomed, fed anything special, located in the VIP cabin, or listened to as a superior.

The first to go was the latter statement, as it was pointed out to him that he has no way of ordering them to do those things should he no longer count as their superior. Thereafter, it turned out that the Prince’s allergy to common pony food had intensified greatly, causing him to spend three days sick, and be forced to eat from his own reserves. Not much longer after that, his skin had begun to cover itself in ghastly pimples, and nasal evacuations were abound whenever he passed by any of the engineers. By the seventh day since his decree, Blueblood was forcefully put back into his original place of residence, violently groomed and taken care of, and addressed as Prince regardless of his desires. He still somehow managed to keep his snout unshaved, though, no matter how hard he would be coerced.

Moreover, the stallion’s addled mind had grown a stronger will than prior, at least as far as Raven was concerned. Blueblood would continue to ask that, despite all the failures, he undergo his intended transformation. Lacking the heart to upset the stallion any further, Raven agreed.

As such, she now lived with a significantly scruffier Blueblood, whose mane she cut shorter one lock per day. He originally insisted that it all go at once, but the texture of the scissors and the sheer viciousness of the procedure caused him to convulse in pain when she barely approached him. Still, they had made some progress over the week. The Prince now looked like he was balding slightly quicker than normal.

“No, no, this pace won’t do…” Blueblood complained to himself, holding a tender hoof to his head. “This isn’t enough. This has to go.” He knocked himself on the chest, staring at Raven somewhat frighteningly. “This has to go. Raven, I don’t want to look like this any longer. And I…”

“Sir?..” she urged him to continue, watching how the stallion fumbled, his eyes darting.

“I do not know how. I have tried all I could think of, but you have forced me out of it. My wits are at an end, Raven,” he waved his hooves in the air, continuing to stare right into the mare. “I need help.”

“You do,” she nodded, rolling her eyes for a scant moment. “Well… If you would want my help—”

“I would.” Blueblood nodded shakily.

They stared at each other while Raven thought rapidly. In truth, she asked merely because the logical thing to assume would be that her offer would be dismissed. Now, she had to form a reasonable thing to say.

The first thing to suffice was:

“Um… You could start by wearing something different!”

They both looked at Blueblood’s suit, Blueblood himself inquisitive and Raven wondering if what she said did, in fact, make sense. Thankfully, it appeared that in all of his delirium, the Prince had not swapped clothes in a very long while. The secretary sighed in relief as the stallion prodded the tainted suit.

Over the four hours that were spent with her trying to pitch the Prince various new designs. Fortunately, it was typical of royalty the likes of him to travel with what felt like entire coffers full of fashions, and be completely unaware of their contents. It seemed an easy task, at first, but soon enough it turned out that Blueblood wanted little to do with his old sterling self. That having caused such a time sink, by when they were done, it was already rather dark outside, and the engines had been suspiciously quiet for the past quarter hour.

Raven wiped sweat off her forehead and went to bang on the new, much thinner door into the main compartment. She had already noticed their halt, but the Prince needed additional calming for her not to return to find the clothes on fire, or worse.

“Hello?” she called out, banging on the door again. “What’s our problem, why have we stopped?”

There was, once again, no reply, and she banged once more - harder, this time. As her hoof struck the metal with more force, it creaked open slightly, having been unlocked the whole time.

The engine compartment/staff section was empty, much colder, and still showing signs of the recent mauling. Only a weak lamp illuminated it, standing atop a pile of crates, barely shedding light on the plain beds and tables in the humble area their technicians occupied. Eerie clinking, slurping noises came in from the outside, perverted even further by the soundproof hull and the echo. The empty beds almost caused Raven some fright, until she had noticed that one of the doors to the outer hull was open, letting in the cold air.

Casting a glance at the Prince, who was, fortunately, busy digging in a briefcase full of clothing never worn before, the secretary took the lamp off the crates, and headed for the door. Steps away from leaving, she backtracked and put on a spare coat - some final inspection even unveiled a sharp screwdriver in the front pocket. She levitated it in front of her, walking slowly, in fencing formation. The mare opened the door out of the empty engine compartment, and entered the cold, dark unknown.

Immediately, she was surrounded by equine figures. Before she could jab the screwdriver into at least one of their throats, however, her glasses were hit by a particularly large snowflake, and knocked her off course, allowing one of the figures to catch her.

“Ms. Raven? What are you doing outside?” asked a familiar gruff voice. “We were just about done examining the chock-up, and then you…”

“I thought something happened,” she stated plainly, having realized, with her eyes adjusting to the dark, that the entire engine crew was standing right outside the door, quietly working around the fuel gauge. “And isn’t it dangerous outside?” the mare frowned in suspicion while the screwdriver was taken away from her.

“Well, that’s exactly why you should have stayed inside! The temperature may be inhabitable out here, but we can’t just allow you to get into any more trouble.”

“Last I checked, I was in charge of not letting us get into any more trouble, thank you very much.” Raven scowled, fixing up the collar of her coat, finally let go by the stallion that caught her.

“We’d figured you had your fill of duties looking after Prince Blueblood, ma’am. Didn’t want to bother you any more than you needed to be…” the chief engineer mumbled, looking guilty. “Although, since you’re here… We were going to come ask something of you, as a matter of fact.”

The mare shivered a little, getting adjusted to the bitter winter outside. They were on a level patch of land, probably an actual road, for once. The snow only reached her fetlock area, too - this place was, indeed, inhabitable enough. While the pitch blackness of eight in the evening obscured any other details, this at least felt better than the toothy gorge or the ruin-filled field. They had made extra effort to stray to the side of that patch of the Frozen North, even if that was to slow them down just a little. Perhaps, if it was brighter outside, the forest they intended to head for would have been visible…

“What would you need?” Raven asked, watching the other technicians clumped near the fuel gauge dissipate.

“Well, if what we’re thinking is happening is happening — and it is...” He nodded to a pony that came up to him and said something the mare could not quite make out. “We’re going to seek out locals for some help. We’ve ran out of physical fuel, it seems. And the—” He looked at Raven briefly, blinking a few times, eyes shifting. “Well, in simple terms, the magical charge won’t move us ahead by itself, so we need to find something to refuel. Anything flammable does.”

“I see. Did we run out already?”

“Yeah, we did.”

They exchanged understanding looks and headshakes, and Raven sighed deeply, rubbing one foreleg against the other.

“And where are we meant to find those locals? They could be miles away, and in this darkness, we wouldn’t have any lights powerful enough, and I don’t think that using magic outright is a good idea in this place, and then we have to convince them, and then…” she listed off all the issues that came to her mind.

“Well, for one, we need you for that last part, since you’re in charge of diplomacy. As for the rest… well…” The pony meekly gestured Raven to come with him, and they came to the other side of their vehicle. “That part’s already covered, I guess.”

Less than fifty meters away from where they stood, there were torches and window lights of what must have been a small village. The mare rubbed a cold, snowy hoof against her face and sighed at that cognitive failure of hers.

Her breath halted when she remembered something.

“There… is a problem. I think we’ve forgotten something,” she said, looking at the chief engineer, both of them grimacing in nearly physical pain as they both realized. “I’m not in charge of diplomacy here. Prince Blueblood is.”

Another hour and a half later, they had managed to drag the royal stallion outside the vehicle and explain the situation to him. The latter part was somewhat simple, surprisingly enough. He nodded and sighed to all that he was told to do, which was - stand still, look appropriate, and nod when it felt fitting. The stallion’s mark may have been an crystalline compass of some description, but he definitely had a talent in recognizing important parts of conversations he was not partaking in.

“It will all be fine. No ponies, no matter how estranged, would refuse to help if they can afford to. With you by our side, it will all go as smoothly as possible. Do you understand?” Raven spoke to Blueblood in as caring a manner as possible. “Gather yourself, it will be alright. You’re an Equestrian Prince, even if shaken up. You’ll see, they will look at you, lend us their aid, and it’ll be right as rain again. Just say you’re an Equestrian Prince, okay? They may not recognize you very well.”

“Yeah, you don’t need to worry, sir. You… are dressed a little light, though. Do you want a coat?” the chief engineer asked him as they headed towards the burning lights, which now clearly illuminated a large wooden gate and wall. “It’s all too warm out here, but still, you don’t want to catch a cold.”

“I don’t honestly know,” Blueblood muttered, dragging his legs toward the Northern village. It was never in his plan to leave the carrier again, let alone while he was desperately scrambling for a fitting disguise. The time spent rearranging his wardrobe filled him with abnormal hatred for all that connected him to… what he supposed was only fitting to call his “old life”. It was an undescribed, obscure feeling that he felt as he looked at himself in the mirror, desperately attempting to not be what he saw in there.

When they came for his admittedly laughable aid, he had fastened his mane into a long ponytail, and put on a pair of lightly tinted glasses to cover his eyes, if only from himself. He dealt away with the sweat, blood, and alcohol-covered shirt underneath the suit, as well as the suit itself. Instead, he saw that a thick, black, vest-like tuxedo looked the least like what he used to, and never found a fitting item to wear underneath. It hung on him, too big for even his large frame. A neck tie was wrapped around his neck, so as to cover the remaining burns from over a week ago. Blueblood, for himself, was nearly satisfied.

He looked strange now. Different. Still pampered, but the cuts and burns remained, and with the glasses on, he saw that a pair of bags had formed under his eyes. One eye even twitched. If not for how cold it felt outside with all that on… He could have gotten used to it. No longer paper. Something more… solid.

“Now, please, just do what you always do best,” he heard Raven order him gently, and nodded in response. They stood in front of massive gates, torches at the tops of two towers by its sides, and the Prince could already feel a hint of acne creeping onto his snout, for he smelled smoke, wood, drink, and sweat. Effectively all of his allergies were contained behind those gates.

And yet, the idea of turning back and refusing to leave the cabin ever again was left discarded. He raised his head as Raven called out for the village ponies in their native language.

“I’m going to do something. Something important,” he murmured to himself as a commotion rose behind the gates, setting the technicians behind him on edge. “I’ll simply up and do it. Out with the old, in with the new. I’m all different now. All different, all different… not going to ruin this.” Blueblood breathed into his forehooves, having grown a little woozy. “Nowhere to go from here but up and ahead.”

He shivered a little as a bright orange light from a peculiar-looking torch mechanism shone down on them, first the engineering team, then Raven, and then himself. The sensation on his skin caught him as odd - that sort of irritation he only felt from light derived from fire. Definitely a peculiarity when it came to lighting mechanisms. As far as he was aware, anyway. In any case, it was rather unpleasant how the spotlight lingered on him for that long… However, he decided not to complain, for once.

“...and we would like your help, if you could lend us any!” Raven was in the middle of her exchange with the ponies behind the gate, waving a hoof so they could be seen below.

“You have to wait!” a thickly accented, deep, male voice from the top of the gates shouted down at them. “Precautions.”

“What is happening?” Blueblood asked nervously, having noticed that the spotlight has been down on him for over a minute by then.

“They’re a bit suspicious, I guess. We’re not the most probable story. Don’t worry, they probably just want to identify who you are,” Raven calmed him down, and pointed at a group of fiery lights that hopped from one of the towers and to a nearby snowy hill, getting close to them.

Blueblood could not see too well with the light and snow affecting his new glasses, but something caught him as odd about those lights. For one, they cast themselves on ponies incrementally larger than the ones with him, as the smallest one had to be greater in bulk than even their chief engineer. And for another, the sources of the lights, the torches… Or, rather, torch-like apparatuses that hung by their sides, kept on by neck straps. Down-wind from them, he could smell terrible odors, curling his stomach up quite efficiently if not for the pre-existing knots from the cold. Initially, he thought that this was simply the trait of a non-elite pony, but then remembered that this was much more alike to the smell that his fireplace once emitted when he disposed of barbarous animal oil presented to him by a deer delegacy via its flames. It was common sense versus logic, and the Prince could but shrug.

Raven waved towards the Northerners, but Blueblood could not help but feel worry. Common folk were extremely unpredictable, not only in causing him sickness at that. These were definitely common.

“Raven… What do they need all the fire for?” he asked the secretary.

“Well… I guess… I guess they might think you’re a changeling. That’s reasonable enough. Look, one of them even has a paper with him. Most likely a picture of yours. They’ll see that it’s you and nothing is going to be wrong. If the worst comes to the worst—”

Before she could finish, a roaring burst of flame shot in their faces, stopping less than a meter before engulfing half the Equestrian delegacy. Each of them, not only Blueblood - although he outdid them - screeched and screamed out in surprise. The initial burst was followed by more, from all sides, before they were surrounded by an entire ring of flame, melting the snow around them slowly and unveiling pale, brown soil.

“STAND IN PLACE!” the pony in the lead of the firestarters screamed at them from beneath a layer of cloth and goggles that obscured his face. “THIS ONE TO THE FRONT!” He pointed the torch-like object in Blueblood’s direction, causing the unicorn’s heart to stop temporarily. Nobody would push him forward, however, so another threatening burst of flame was in order. He then weakly stepped ahead, legs shaking with each step. Everyone was quiet.

“Gentlec—” Raven tried to speak out, but instead received another hurl of flame launched in her direction from another one of the Northern ponies. “What is going on?! We’re an Equestrian delegacy, I told you! We even have Prince Blueblood! It was in your newspapers!”

“Yes, it was,” the stallion pointing the burning appliance in Blueblood’s direction answered, albeit with difficulty in pronouncing the sound “s”. “Only we aren’t idiots, and you are.”

“What do you mean?!” Raven shouted in response, while Blueblood just stood rooted in place and staring at the piece of paper clipped to the Northern stallion’s chest. His eye twitched a little as he watched that pony detach the paper and raise it up in the air, for Raven and the rest to see.

“Also in the newspapers is this,” he answered grimly, as Raven and the rest read the newspaper clipping.

It was a wanted sign - something unique to the fringe territories, the mare would know - and on it was a picture that made her jaw drop temporarily. Depicted there was an artist’s rendition of a tall, white, blonde unicorn stallion who wore tinted glasses and whose mane was tied in a ponytail - just below the neck line started a thick, oversized black vest and a lazily thrown on black neck tie. He scowled from the page, and, on top of it all, had a significant stubble.

Blueblood was still staring into that stallion’s eyes, but Raven quickly saw a few details that pulled her out of the stupor. That pony’s snout was much longer, his horn was thinner and with a different spiral, the eyes behind the glasses were a dim purple color as opposed to Blueblood’s gentle teal, there were multiple cuts on his snout in places Blueblood never had any, and, finally, she could tell that that pony was much thinner than the Prince.

Of course, of much relief was the caption that read:

WANTED ALIVE/DEAD

“GOLDLOCK”

FOR CAPITAL TREASON (EQUESTRIAN KINGDOM, GRIFFON EMPIRE), MURDER, KIDNAPPING, LARCENY, VANDALISM, ACTS OF TERROR, IDENTITY THEFT.

EXTREMELY DANGEROUS, VIOLENT, CAPABLE ACTOR, ACTS WITH ANTI-POLITICAL ANARCHISTIC AGENDA.

IF BROUGHT ALIVE: 250.000 EB/40.000 GF

IF BROUGHT DEAD: 100.000 EB/500.000 GF

That meant that this definitely was not Blueblood, not by any freak coincidence. Merely… a freak coincidence.

“This is just a coincidence!” Blueblood nodded rapidly to his own thoughts, attempting to defend himself.

“You’re not being asked!” the Northerner in the lead barked at him, “And stop playing dumb if you want us to turn you to the Equestrians! Or we’ll mind the currency exchange, maybe!”

“This is all wrong!” the Prince screamed at the top of his lungs, “We just want your help! We aren’t your enemies! What has come to happen to you that you won’t aid your own brethren?!”

Raven gulped and backed into the technicians, looking back at them, and then at the growing ring of flame.

“I am not giving a history lecture! You would know why if you were Blueblood,” the other stallion shot back. “Two weeks ago, he was in our capital, discussing this exact thing! Don’t think we will let you go just because we’ll think you’re too dumb to be that criminal!”

Prince Blueblood stood in place, huffing and puffing. His face turned red, only in part due to the cold. As the rest of his ponies - his ponies, he realized, whether they agreed on that or not - clumped into a tight crowd behind him, he threw off his glasses and stepped vehemently toward the fire. Some of them murmured and shuffled, he even saw a shadow of a hoof motioning something among the crowd, but he would put that in control later. This was his time, Blueblood realized. Do or die, and he was meant to do something. Last he checked, he registered as an Equestrian Prince, and he intended to live up to it.

At least, that was how the personally named idiocy center of his brain justified his actions from then on.

“If you want me that much, then come get me! I am coming! Do you hear me? I surrender!” the unicorn’s voice nearly sounded like a low-toned rooster’s screech, so rabid he was. “I am coming with you, and you send me back to Equestria! They will see who I really am, throw me in the gutter, and you’ll get your reward!”

Blueblood stared at the clothed-up Northerner while his snout nearly burned, so close to the ring of fire he was.

“Huh.”

“What are you waiting for?! Only now realized that you can't turn in a charred corpse and expect them to believe you?!” Blueblood yelled angrily, bits of spittle landing into the foul-smelling flames and turning into steam.

“Well, if that’s how you want it…” the large pony shrugged and shouted back in his language. For a second, the Prince squinted, anticipating a painful death, since on the Northerner’s order, every torch was pointed at their huddle. The lead flamer said something else, and he could clearly hear the word “Griffon” in his speech multiple times. The next moment, however, an unpleasant, rapid, cold gust of wind blew them apart, as air was sucked into the apparatuses, removing the flames, as well as pulling a few of the ponies onto the ground.

Blueblood was among them, having fallen flat on his face, right there where the ring of fire previously was. He was livid, angry, perturbed. In bits over how he had nothing to prove his genuinuity as a Prince - whom, indeed, he never truly was. Steaming over how these fringe rebels - as he had now remembered at least a fragment of the exact deal with the Northerners that caused the entire meeting to adjourn - would treat his suite in such a manner simply for such mercenary goals. Foaming over how he, Prince Blueblood - or was he? - had turned himself into a laughable mess that looked like a deranged criminal, yelled at some commoner whose smell alone gave him sniffles and pimples, and acted like a mindless ape so that other commoners be spared violence directed at him.

It was nothing he ever thought of, let alone prepared for, or was taught to do. None of it, none at all. It felt like a distant dream, or a bleak fantasy that would graze the edge of his mind and leave when nothing tingled at its presence. He was not meant for it. His compass was never pointed there - his compass, indeed, barely had an arrow, and most ponies thought it was just a peculiar-looking gem embedded in his flank. And yet, there he was, laying on cold now, listening to screams, mostly in Equestrian, and looking at a large body wrapped in brown cloth laying next to him, a screwdriver sticking out of its glassy winter goggles. Dark red liquid poured out of a crack in it, and the body would not move - not until it was shoved aside by a smaller equine that pulled off the large metal contraption laying on its side, and was quickly helped to aim it up by another one of the small figures. Blueblood could just about draw a connection or two, but, in frankness, his mind had decided that it had worked more than enough, and was only conscious enough to scold itself for its behavior. The Prince barely knew what he was feeling, aside from cold.

Confusion was the easiest thing to go with, and his addled mind kept to it. He heard shouting, cracking, and roaring around him. Loud objects hit the ground near where he lay, and racuous blasts laid way for ugly, oily smells and heat. He stared at the cracked glassy mask and the screwdriver in it for a few seconds more, until that screwdriver was rapidly pulled out by a shaky magical aura. A feminine whimper and a loud male scream came onto his ears, and he had to cover them with his hooves. Moments later, a large, rusty metal bolt cracked the ground where his left hoof used to be, sending a crack of frozen soil right into the stallion's face. Before that fact could compute itself, he felt his body be lifted atop an equine frame, which then galloped off - away from the noises and smells. The Prince's messy muzzle got shifted backwards in the hurry, his carrier's backside serving him as a chin stand.

Now, Blueblood could clearly see how the patch of land where they stood, significant by how it still radiated in the darkness, and was devoid of snow, became littered with debris. Chunks of earth were missing, large bolts were imbedded in the ground, and, more than that, he clearly saw at least two massive bodies lay without motion. A massive amount of smaller bolts peppered the area where he would have been had he never been picked up. He even noticed the one that came in first.

The stallion saw little else as the road was shaky for his carrier. Soon enough, however, he spotted flaming torches in the dark, and more enraged screaming in a language he did not understand. At that point, he decided that was definitely more than enough, and his mind shut itself down for his own benefit.

“I just want to be something different,” he thought his parting thought, hearing faint cheers and loud bangs, as well as a female voice and hoof try to slap him back into reality. “Not Blueblood.”

The cold darkness became darkness regular, and the entire ruckus went away. Blueblood was calm, hurting, confused, scared, hungry, and on severe alcoholic withdrawal. Definite, at the very least.

“But I don’t want to pretend, no. I’ll show them. I’ll show them all. They’ll take me for something better than this,” his tumbling consciousness decided before shutting off entirely. “I’ve had it with this nonsense. I didn’t not die for nothing.”

A red line crossed his vision, and he trailed off entirely, only a faint glow of that sensation still haunting him into nothingness.

Prince Blueblood would not have good sleep for at least another three weeks, although that was in good part due to the flamethrowers that had to be installed to the sides of their vehicle for acceleration, and in good part due to the many other issues their delegacy had encountered on its way.

Day Twenty Three: Anomaly

Prince Blueblood sat on a stone, chewing on a pack of salted broccoli. Every now and then, he would raise a forehoof to wipe the sweat off his forehead, having to meddle with the furry hood of the coat he was handed. Even worse, though, were the winter goggles that had to be perched atop all their faces while outside. It was unbelievably hot, and his extremities were going slowly numb. The heat was turning the gears in his head, and the pallid skin beneath his coat shivered from the frost.

And when another wave of sand ravaged his broccoli, the stallion could but sigh and lay down on the stone, head perched atop bent forelegs. The sun blazed low in the sky at the crack of 12 PM, but regardless, the darkness was only illuminated by the lamps set up by the technical crew.

By that point, the Prince had already undergone many talks with Raven, who helped him overcome the final memories of a week prior, and was nearly considering himself sane again. It was right around when he almost decided that maybe he could throw off the presumptions of illegitimacy on his part and stop proving himself to nobody in particular, that they ran into a patch of Frozen North forest that turned into a sandy, desolate desert.

Looking no further back than a hundred meters, he could see their vehicle stand on the deep, harsh snow, surrounded by whitened evergreens. Where he sat, a sun-blackened rock kept company to a lone bovine skull. It looked scorching, possibly unsafe to sit on - in fact, his body was telling him that it was the hottest he had ever been. On the insistence of the chief engineer, however, they all kept their clothes on, as evidently the temperature did not rise any. The charming sunset of a faraway desert took up only a bit of the sky, immediately becoming surrounded by stark clouds and faint stars of a dark Northern night. Close nearby, he heard the sands shuffle and whinge as the breeze shifted them. Further away, he could clearly make out the noise of something big getting chomped on, and wailing helplessly all the while.

The wraith-eating plants from a mere kilometer back were a haunting experience, but at least they were an avoidable and overall harmless one. This patch of the Southern East covered their only way through, however.

He dared ponder if they could simply take the vehicle across the anomalous region, but even as he said so he knew there would be a good reason to decline the idea. Sure enough, their carrier was not equipped to cross sand, would likely fail if on any other soft surface, had ran out of fuel again, and, worst of all, appeared sensitive to the traces of magic in the demented area. The cause for this transformation was magical, of course, everyone knew as much.

Therefore, they came to the conclusion that three things needed to be done - the source of the magic had to be found, the source of the magic had to be shut down, and they needed to chop down more wood to feed to their machine, as well as their new thrusters still attached to the sides.

The engineering team recognized the most difficult part, and set to alleviate the pressure by getting to the forests. In passing, they mentioned a single solitary abandoned building in the middle of the desert. Blueblood sighed. That, once again, deprived them, the ViP’s, of anything resembling a real, actual, non-impromptu task. Magic sourcing and shutdown were the most basic things in modern arcanery. He knew how to do it, Raven could do it in her sleep. Any unicorn could do so - granted, especially dedicated magicians who needed a permanent effect on a designated area would concoct ways to defend for longer, but that would soon be cracked. Whatever public service magic was in use in Equestria operated on a trust system, and everybody knew that.

So all there was to do was to walk and then flick a horn, then wait in the now definitely freezing environment until they are ready to go.

Prince Blueblood sighed, packing the ruined broccoli in a bag and adding it to the trash bin he was guarding - the only job nobody else was striving to do, and so the only one he could feasibly volunteer to do. Some distance ahead, Raven was twirling a pen in the air with her magic, and looking inside a notebook. Every so often, she would look back and forth sharply, sometimes landing her gaze on him. Blueblood could just feel how each of those times, she would try to send him back to the carrier again, as if he was not idle enough laying on this scorched, freezing rock.

He merely sighed in acceptance when she set out his way, already getting up and looking at the trash, pointless to be guarded against much but the passing winds. Not even tiny saber rabbits or ice mice would cross into the damnable sands.

“Prince Blueblood, sir, I’ve been—”

“I’m already going, Raven, no need to shoo me off,” Blueblood replied prematurely, raising a forehoof to stop her mid-sentence. An unintended sad sigh escaped his throat and was just audible enough through the snow (sand) mask.

“Ummm…” the secretary fumbled, twirling her pen in the air some more before stuffing it in a pocket. “That isn’t what I meant to ask you. I intended to ask the opposite, as a matter of fact?”

“What would you mean by that?” the unicorn asked, halting his slumpy stature.

“Sir, please… I saw how you have been acting lately. I understand that all this… uh... “ she searched for a word, rolling her eyes back behind her own mask. “Um… all this, has taken a toll on you. But I can’t just let you slip into a neurosis like that. We’ve talked about this, haven’t we?”

“Many times.” He sighed.

“Yes, exactly. So… while you are coming to your senses… I thought that I could offer for you to lead our way to the source of the magic, and even take command while we extinguish it!” Raven did her best to make that sound like an undertaking worthy a grown stallion, not a fourteen year old undergraduate.

Blueblood took a double-take on the sigh, and made an even deeper one. He was not getting a better offer.

“Then so be it. Lead on,” he said idly, tilting his head towards the oblong tall building to their east.

“Um, sir…”

“Oh, right. Right, apologies. Force of habit. That way.”

“Correct. You’re… doing great. Yours is the compass, after all.” She pointed at his flank in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere even further up.

“Thank you.”

On their way there, they did not talk so much. They had, indeed, talked quite a bit as time went on. Being both secluded to the renovated VIP cabin, it was somewhat natural, but after their poor encounter with the locals, Raven insisted on talking to him more. In frankness, he failed to understand what the point of it was - or what exactly she was saying. He struggled to even remember most of what their conversations where about. His mind went blurry, no matter how hard he tried.

It was reminiscent of his childhood memories with the court psychiatrist, and those were far from enticing, so he simply gave up. Maybe his memory was just giving in by itself? For what it was worth, there was little worry in him when he thought back to all that had happened ever since they set out back on their way. The visit to the capital became utterly distant, and all the other events no longer caused him mild panic attacks, or alcoholic relapses.

Thankfully, soon enough, they had reached their destination, and Blueblood finally had something new to focus on - in particular, the peculiar shape of the structure.

“I thought you said this must have been a ruin that got caught in this magic field?” he pondered aloud, looking at the strange writings he could not recognize and the distinctly abnormal architecture. He almost recalled that this looked an awful lot like some ancient sort of structure that commonly began with a “Z”, but even then he was not too sure. Maybe they just looked familiar. “I don’t quite know, but this does not look local.”

“No, it… doesn’t,” Raven answered, walking by the large, pyramid-like structure. “The only ponies ever to live in this region, according to research books, were…” She halted unexpectedly, tilting her head left and right. “These Northern leftovers from before the Union, and those of the Crystal Empire. The Northerners don’t build this way at all, and the entirety of the Crystal Empire was lost a thousand years ago. Besides, what was captured in picture did not look like this at all…”

As the mare pondered to herself, Blueblood removed his goggles, seeing how they had left the sandstormy area. He gazed at the strange symbols on the sharp, angular walls. They looked a lot like hieroglyphs - or whatever the letters the South-Eastern countries used were called - but much swirlier, contradicting the blockiness of the building if he said so himself. There was a shadow of a doubt cast upon his judging it as a leftover from the afflicted area, or as a mere fragment of the magical anomaly now. Atop of what Raven said, of course.

“This would be the entrance,” the mare called out to him, pointing to a dark opening located between two ascending sets of steps. Blueblood perked up somewhat, not having noticed it before, and throwing off the unpleasant assumption of having to ascend to the top of the building. “Could be a bit more difficult to dispel this one if it had created this as a side effect. I’m sure you will handle it, though.”

“Very well then…” he said, having to shimmy to the side a little as the entrance was just a bit too narrow. Somewhat more unpleasantly, it was also pitch black. Him and the secretary went on for some time, until the Prince finally stumbled on a dislodged floor piece, and had to be caught by the tail.

Reestablishing himself, he spat some errant dust out of his mouth, and completely unhooded itself. It seemed reasonable enough now that they were no longer exposed to seemingly nonexistent winds. Raven tried to look ahead, only finding more gloom, and made a “chirk” with her horn, establishing an arcane flare above them to illuminate all of the hallway.

As soon as she did that, the entire building shook, whined, creaked, and threatened to collapse. Blueblood latched onto a brick in the wall, but ended up pulling it out, and tumbling down once again, causing Raven to drag him out to safety once more. The shaking continued, as well as the wailing, and now a significant sandstorm added itself into the mix, causing the stallion to spit yet more unwanted substances out of his mouth.

The secretary grunted as she pulled him out of the collapsing hallway, and finally found a stopping point in what must have been the main and only chamber of the weird structure. From where she stood, she could see the rest of the anomalous desert, even recognizing the pinetrees at the very horizon. With a low murmur, she went to check on Blueblood, but he had already managed to get himself up and finish spitting.

“Well… I suppose this is an unstable magical zone for a reason. That, or this place had suffered too much wear and tear during its time in the anomaly. I’d… question some of what happened,” she said to herself. “But this shouldn’t be a problem, this is all common enough. Are you ready?” She pointed Blueblood to a lectern at the far end of the chamber, elevated above the rest of it, with two round spiraling stairways leading up to it. It emitted an inconsistent brownish-purple glow, one that the few windows and intact objects in the room also shared.

The Prince nodded in response, looking around himself. The mare allowed him to take lead, somewhat wary of the narrow curvy stairs and their loose compatibility with the stallion’s complexion, but ready to catch him again. Her forelegs ached a bit after all the dragging, but it was nothing major. She centered her thoughts on the strange nature of the place, primarily.

These were normal enough - constructs that just happen to shape themselves when a field of magic is left active for far too long. Raven had seen a fair few of those on her assignments, and they were not so bad. This one’s main issue was the strange choice of architecture. One would assume that a rogue magical field in the Frozen North would take on something feral, or Northern, or Crystal at the very least. This, her architectural knowledge told her, was something really, really old, and from the opposite end of the world. The general shape seemed somewhat consistent with the old Southern ruins by the seaside, but most of the ornaments, decorations, and writings appeared Sad-Arabic in origin. Her eyes halted on a few of the writings, barely able to recognize just a few words, but the dialect appeared far older than what she knew of the language. From her own experience, it was more likely than not just a random arrangement of words, like with that one anomalous bakery that advertised “Radiant Winter Bran Fluff”, “Meaty Cupcakes” and “Individual Miniature Strikers”.

A loud, unpleasant cracking sound and a shrill gasp from Blueblood alerted her to reality after the five seconds she dedicated to letting herself think just for a while. By accident, the mare failed to suppress her glare, but the Prince seemed not so concerned about her attitude, pointing downwards rapidly, mouth quivering and eyes shaking.

As she looked down, it finally occured to her that the poorly lit chamber was filled not with rotten debris, but many, many equine bones. Practically all of the floor was covered with them, very few intact, most thrown around in chunks. They had yellowed with time, and bits of them filled up nooks and crannies of the chamber. It was as if a storm of not sand or snow, but bone, went through that place, lodging tiny bits everywhere, leaving only somewhat heavy ones to litter the floor.

“Skeletons,” Blueblood whispered in abject fright, mostly to himself it seemed.

“No, no, Prince Blueblood, calm down… This is normal,” Raven assumed out loud. “No skeletons here. There wouldn’t be anyone to contribute one in such a place. This is clearly made by magic, remember? The most this is is an imitation… and not an intact one. That means we definitely have what it takes to shut it down, return to our vehicle, and proceed on our way. Doesn’t that sound nice?”

The stallion merely gulped in return, his gaze fixated on a massive skull just below the pedestal with the lectern. Despite her own statement, Raven could not help but find this a little strange. It was definitely not absolutely impossible for something like this to have been created by accident, but it was eerie nonetheless. Besides, the skull the Prince stared at… Even a passing glance at it made her frown a little.

It was distinctly equine, albeit not a pony. Much longer and much, much bigger. Giving it another look, she gently pushed Blueblood further ahead, herself taking a few seconds to inspect it.

All she had got out of it was that the neck bones were missing, crudely so, and that, despite enough time having passed for these to at least go yellow, it still bore a husk of purple-ish headwear, and through its empty eye sockets jewels could be seen that must have adorned it prior.

An exasperated, croaky sigh from above signaled to her that she underestimated Blueblood’s ability to ascend the stairs. He complained:

“This… this... thing, it will not move! Could you lend me some help? Just… not too quickly, I think I may take another ja— Ow!”

Raven was already halfway up the stairs when a loud crack and a sudden wheeze became fruit of the stallion’s efforts. On the large stone pedestal, there was only a lectern with a rotted, darkened book, and what looked at the very first glance like a lever. Blueblood was correct to assume that the lever was to be pushed, as a disablement mechanism was intrinsic to the vast majority of anomalies such as this one.

Only the very second look told her that this was not a lever. Sure enough, floating in the now chillingly windy chamber was an extremely long, sturdy, metal staff, with a much darker, mustier lower half, all in all two meters or so long. Staves were not a usual component of such places, and them floating upon having caused wind and wail to happen was also very strange.

“Oh, come on, how did you…” She started towards Blueblood, frowning heavily, letting out nose through her air as sand, picked up by the sudden winds, got in through the crashed opening. “Sir, you could have waited! It’s… It’s… It’s not very safe to do this alone!”

“But you said I could!” he said in his defense, turning her way. She saw genuine remorse in his eyes and hung her head momentarily.

“I said we could! You saw how complicated this construct was, it would not have been safe to do it by yourself - the two of us, we could have done so easily, and you’d have contributed your share!”

“But I—”

The argument was interrupted by loud clattering and ear-piercing wailing. Blueblood fell on the ground, covering himself with his forehooves, while Raven looked to the source of the noise, and left her jaw open. Sand got in immediately, but that did not much distract her from the spectacle.

The bone pieces scattered all over the chamber were flying rapidly towards the center, massing themselves into a tight clump. Some that were lodged in the walls hit her and the Prince on their way back, slashing through their clothes, not enough to harm them, but significant of their movement force. The lectern - the rotted book in particular - now shone a powerful brown and purple. She had begun to piece together what was happening.

“SIR, WE HAVE TO GO.” The mare knocked on Blueblood’s back, and began to pull him away and downstairs before he even responded.

The exact picture did not form in her mind by the time it was already complete, when they arrived downstairs that is.

“HahahahahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! HAH! HAHAH!” a booming, nasal, somewhat croaky voice cackled passionately, echoing off the walls near the two.

“Oh sweet heavens how could—” she heard Blueblood mutter to himself, but his voice was silenced by the thing in the middle.

It… spoke, very vehemently, clearly directing its words at them, standing right before it where the skull used to lay. Only Raven had no idea what it was saying. For some time, the mare had no idea what it looked like, either - sand had gotten into her glasses and eyes. As she took the former off, though…

Floating in the air before them was a ghastly, ghostly figure composed of bone and energy. All the little bone pieces, shattered and scattered across the room, were in it - some did not hold too well, many left cracks to show, and a couple were missing, but together, they completed a big equine skeleton. That skeleton, Raven was correct before, was not of a pony. That was a horse. A much bigger one than the ones that currently inhabited the Sad-Arabic Emirates.

It floated vertically, its angled, crooked forelegs grasping the staff, which now illuminated the chamber a very bright brown. The same brown, with inklings of purple here and there, composed the rest of the horse’s body. It was skinny, tall, and yet more massive than its kin that Raven was aware of. A snout riddled with wrinkles and sores, as well as a ring of jewelry wrapped across the neck and behind the ears. A cluttered, clumpy, long purple beard that stretched below even where its hind legs were - some meters above the two ponies. The brown and purple energy composed clothes as well - wavy, dingy, once-luxurious robes with cuts and blots all over them, and an uncharacteristically bright crown atop its head. Jewelry of the same high quality riddled its body, each foreleg equipped with no less than four massive rings and bracers. Finally, deep in the back of its head were two flaming, staring, pinprick golden eyes.

Raven and Blueblood’s staring at the figure disallowed either of them from listening to what it was saying, or saying anything themselves. The mare was the first one to concede that the beard must have meant that this was a “he” - that, as well as the voice, had to be clear. As for the rest, they just stared, very slowly backing off into the wall, the Prince slowly pushing into Raven’s side.

The figure, in the meantime, gestured excessively, and continued to talk. When the most either of the ponies responded with was following his long, ugly forehooves as they threw themselves all around, he loudly knocked itself on the skull, the hoof going right through the energy-composed skin and coat. An echoing sigh emitted from him, and Blueblood jerked violently, letting out a loud scream, as he was pulled from Raven. The signature brown and purple enveloped him, pulling him into the sand storm that raged around the figure, despite how much he reared back and how Raven almost caught him by the tail.

The mare almost yelled out in denial when the Prince’s head was thrust forward, mouth forced open, and unpleasant brown energy was poured into it, but the moment she opened her own mouth, sand snuck its way inside. When she’d stopped coughing, it was just in time to catch the stallion as he was thrown back to her. Doing so with most of her body, she was able to recognize that he was still alive, and appeared to be functional.

“Is this… seriously… how you talk now?” the ethereal, croaky voice pondered a-very-loud. “This… is not… right.” Raven, gripping Blueblood tight as he shook, eyes staring at the horse in the middle of the chamber, now recognized his speech. He spoke Equestrian… with a very thick Sad-Arabian accent, and not one that was much present nowadays, but still.

“This is wrong. What is this word salad?” He spat indignantly, a boney tooth landing in front of the ponies, and being pulled back in by the exasperated floating skeleton. “A lot of it is… hm… Oh come on!”

He thrust himself upwards, gesturing madly and swirling the staff in his forehooves. Artificial thunder followed his speech, and the sand spun much quicker.

“They banished me for a hundred years! Did those stupid, barbarous, indignant, sleazy cat-birds take over in so little time?! Did they? Answer me, you deformed mutants!” he screamed, his voice becoming a booming falsetto. “They probably let you all out of your pens and dealt away with us while we were at it, didn’t they?!”

“We’re not mutants!” Blueblood screamed in return, somehow challenging the croaking of the ancient creature with his own voice. “We are Equestrians! And there are no catbirds ruling us!”

“Eque— What? Oh… Oh, oh.” The creature went silent for a moment, while Raven patted Blueblood on the back, if only for still being conscious. A pat turned into a massive kick as the figure swung its staff, crashed it through a wall, and roared in its high pitch:

“IDIOTS! DEGENERATES! CRETINS! NE’ER DO WELLS!” In addition to the thunder, he now struck the floor with his staff after each word. “ONE HUNDRED YEARS! AND MUTANTS TAKE YOU OVER! WELL, GOOD RIDDANCE!” He spun around, and made some form of gesture to the frozen wasteland outside…

....Raven and Blueblood only noticed then that the desert had receded significantly, and the majority of the landscape outside was now the old, familiar, Frozen North. Only their chamber contained sand, for all they saw. The same appeared obvious to the floating skeleton, who stared at the vista, forehooves dropped down and the staff barely levitating by its side.

“And they turn our great deserts into… this,” he whispered angrily. “No, no. No, no, no, no, no! You were idiots! You banished me! You banned my teachings! You made me into a story for little children, no doubt! But you cannot be so worthless! NO! If you were, I’d have been Vizier for fifty years now! I, Al-Walid, the Hocus Magistre, have taken more time to take over the world than these stupid creatures did?! NO.”

With a roar, the shape turned its head to them, not bothering to turn the rest of the body around. In that manner, it floated close to the two, and bent down, the skull and the unshapely equine face on top of it all too close to the ponies. Blueblood receded backwards with a gasp when the ethereal beard went through his own snout.

“What year is this,” Al-Walid asked them. He drilled through both of them with his eyes, dedicated one to each of the two.

“One thousand and two years since the fall of Nightmare Moon,” Blueblood answered with a gulp while Raven stared at the thing.

“I have no idea who that is.”

Before the secretary could come up with ways of situation management for this encounter, Blueblood somehow found it in him to keep talking.

“The… sister of Princess Celestia, who went renegade and wished to overthrow her rule.”

“Who is Princess Celestia.”

“The… um… ruler of Equestria for the past… uhhhhhh… two thousand years?”

“Is Equestria where you undercooked abominations live?”

“We’re not—” Blueblood’s voice croaked no less than four times, and he stopped. “Yes, it is.”

“You have been around for two thousand years.”

“Well… there were dark times when the windigoes ruled us… but they aren’t documented very well…”

“Windigoes.”

Al-Walid stared at them, especially Raven, who let Blueblood speak for the time being, and sighed. It turned away from them, and faced towards the great white expanse.

“He lied to me. The Master went and lied to me. And now…” he threw his forelegs up in the air. “Now, these de-evolved degenerates rule the planet.”

The mare shot her eyes wide open, getting a bit of sand in them right away, at the mention of a Master. As soon as she rubbed it out, she peeked over Blueblood to look closer.

“Some lichdom. You…” The skeleton looked around and pierced through them once more. “Are you worth conquering? Are you?! Who am I even talking to, how did you manage to pass all the traps these stupid freaks set up at the entrance? I know they did! I was world evil to them! They’d never have left my remains guarded by less than ten times the amount of idiotic little mechanisms than would be excessive!”

The two ponies took some time to process what was said, and Raven was the first to speak out. Her mind raced, and her eyes shifted back and forth, cold sweat dropping from her forehead, but not much else could be done.

“We are a diplomatic envoy to the occupied territory of the North lead by Prince Blueblood.” She tapped on the shivering stallion’s back as he stared abstractly at the lich. “He is among our greatest specimens, and if you dispose of us, I will fight to the end to preserve him.”

The three of them stared at each other for a period of time. Blueblood alternated between Al-Walid and Raven, Raven at Al-Walid, and Al-Walid at both of them.

“This is your greatest specimen. How did you—”

“We are a peaceful kingdom that extends the ties of friendship to any and all. We currently take up sixty percent of the largest continent on planet Equis.” Raven’s eye twitched a little and her voice shook, but yet she spoke on, reciting from memory.

“Planet Equis. Peaceful kingdom. Sixty percent,” the lich repeated after her.

“This place is the most dangerous part of the entire planet, and is populated by the few that refuse our rule.”

“How many?”

“Less than ten thousand renegades.”

“How many of you are there?”

“Ponies alone? Two billion.” Raven had begun to grin just a little, mostly out of nerves.

Al-Walid had attempted to speak, but stopped himself with a hoof. Then he did so again, and stopped once more. Then he raised his staff up in the air, and a faint purple glow seeped through the roof, returning shortly and causing him to shake his head. He floated up in the air for a few moments, cradling his skull in his forehooves, as the ponies watched. A monumental sigh escaped the lich. He extended a forehoof to them, and peeked one eye out.

“What do you know of the Great Deserts?” he demanded in frustration.

“They are an empty wasteland of sand, nomads, oases, and our set of vassal states, the Saddle Arabian Emirates.” Raven nodded as she spoke, ears and eyes both twitching by then.

“Saddle. Arabian.”

“Yes, Saddle Arabian Emirates.”

“They export oasis moisture and cloth,” Blueblood squeaked a fact in.

Al-Walid retreated into his previous pose. An even larger sigh escaped him.

“I was going to rule the Great Desert Empire, you know. Was steps away from it, before the… Pursuer Corps, I think they will call it in this primitive mish-mash, found me in the middle of a ritual. I had my power already when they struck me down, and left me headless. The Master promised… that lest my phylactery be destroyed, I would return in a hundred years to a weakened, soiled empire to rebuild to my liking. It sounds good, don’t you think?”

Neither of them responded. The lich floated to the middle of the room.

“Now, I wake up, and this…” He threw his legs to the sides and his head backwards, the skull nearly falling off. “THIS is what I see? This is what time has done to MY planet? Equestria? Planet EQUIS? THIS is your Prince?”

Faint ethereal breaths left him as he floated, burning eyes shut. When they opened, the lich was fuming, staring right at the confused duo, and twirling his staff rampantly.

“I think not.”

Raven shut her eyes in disbelief, immensely relieved that her plan worked. It would make absolutely no sense in retrospect, but it worked…

“I want no part in this.”

She allowed herself a sigh of relief, clutching Blueblood’s still staring body.

“This is a punishment worse than I had ever earned, and all I had earned was a place on the throne of an Empire that no longer exists.”

The two ponies felt immense magic seep out of the place, a massive discharge - much like what they intended to do. There was little to no sand left, and the brown and purple glow had grown weaker. On the horizon, a dozen of equine figures bearing lights could already be seen.

“And a certain SOMEBODY,” Al-Walid screamed, ramming his staff into the large circle in the middle of the room, sending glowing cracks outwards. “CLEARLY. DESERVES IT. DON’T YOU THINK, MASTER?! YOU BE DAMNED!”

The hole grew, wider and wider, and finally, a vibrant brown lightning was launched into it, illuminating the entire Northern forest outside. A massive quake, much worse than when the hallways collapsed back when they so presumptuously entered, took over the ground, sending a few of the faraway ponies tumbling down.

“Hehehehehehehahahahah! HAHAH! SO LONG! MY PLANS ARE RUINED, BUT I HAVE ESCAPED THIS TORMENT!” the lich cackled abundantly, gripping the staff with his hooves. “HAVE FUN IN THIS POINTLESS GENERATION, “MASTER”! You did… tell me… to awaken you… after all… Ha-ha-haaaaahhh…”

Al-Walid dissipated into thin air with a flash, his skeleton immediately rotting apart and disappearing from sight, likely to go back where this place truly belonged. Raven let go of Blueblood for just a second, mouth gaping at the dissolved ancient mage, but that was enough for him to have charged towards the crack, forehoof lent back as if for a punch. The Prince roared dementedly, screaming something incoherent.

The mare charged after him, towards the eerily glowing pit, and only just barely tackled the stallion at the very edge. Both of them came close to rolling inside, their heads hanging off the cracks. Raven did all she could not to look down, knowing to focus on pulling both their weights outwards. She signaled with a hoof and yelled for the engineering team to help, feeling her body grow weaker and weaker.

Finally, an external force rolled her over, pasting snow and sand all over her face and glasses. A louder thump, coupled with resistent whines, was for Blueblood. He had spent that entire time staring into the pit of whatever the lich broke free in his dying moment. Raven, for better or worse, was spared from that fate.

That said, the bizzarre red line that crossed her vision before her consciousness decided to give in was not much calm.

Days Twenty Eight to Thirty Three: Escort

Author's Note

Non-English parts of this chapter are just there for flavor. You won't find much interesting in there. Not a lot, anyway. There aren't many, don't worry.

As for the length compared to the other chapters, I have no excuse.

Days Twenty Eight to Thirty Three: Escort

“I swear, whoever put up a roadblock in an undead forest…” Blueblood heard the chief engineer grumble in exasperation as he and his crew measured and generally observed the massive blockade made of dark concrete that stood in the way of their carrier.

The huge, dark green plastic-covered blocks were bigger than even the vehicle that they had driven through so much of the accursed terrain, and stretched a lasting expanse.. Coming across these was more than a little unexpected, as the past dozen or so kilometers had been absolutely inhospitable. To think that something this big was carried there from either direction was alarming.

The Prince shuddered to think what this could have implied, primarily because he had absolutely no idea, and that gave him a slight twitch of the nerve. Somehow, however, it lifted his companions’ spirits a bit when they first saw it and got over the fact that their old direction was no longer an option. Nobody would explain it to him, as appeared to be the norm for the past few days, so he was left to ponder by himself. Eventually, when the other ponies returned from their examination with much more disturbed and solemn looks upon them, it seemed only fitting that he be left out of the loop.

So he sat by himself, in the VIP cabin, staring out the window and pondering. As he did so, the ponies outside gathered round and appeared to be talking, arguing even. That only added more building blocks to the puzzle that Blueblood was already ill-equipped to assemble. Raven seemed to be holding her own against the technical crew, while the chief engineer appeared to be overly insistent about something roughly in their carrier’s direction. Both parties looked distant, as they had been for some time. The stallion’s eyes had began to burn, and he let out a shrill sigh.

The Prince truly did feel somewhat blue about the strained relationships, although he understood - very few of them, including even Raven, made contact with him after the incident some five days back. He made numerous attempts, forcing himself to overcome coughing fits that happened whenever he would even think of talking to ponies of lower stature, and yet each time he was vehemently assured that nothing was out of the ordinary and he should return to his room. That left his mind somewhat content, but a lingering feeling of distrust began to settle within him.

The regular sessions where his snout would be connected to some awfully loud mechanical apparatus and he could very clearly feel it attempt to suck something out of him were also becoming a bit of an issue. Inquiries on the nature of that particular treatment bore few results, it being explained away as for his own good. Raven in particular would have her horn lit around him particularly often, and the feeling of her eyes piercing his back whenever he turned around became commonplace. All that, the stallion had no idea how to interpret. As far as he was aware, this merely coincided with the many insanities they had encountered on this journey, and his timetracking attempts had told him that they had just crossed the four week mark.

Unable to tell much more from the arguing ponies’ looks and glad that he underwent the last suction procedure an hour ago, he laid down on the couch and sunk his face into an open paper. Some minutes later, he realized that he was laying on the map of the region, and gave it a passing glance. After spending time to find the approximate area they were in, the Prince actually pinpointed the location where they had stopped. Looking over the map a bit more, he saw nothing that caught his interest, and he went back to slowly pondering. His eyes started to close, and the low hum that perpetrated his head every now and then came back.

That was when he realized that beyond this blockade was a much plainer barren expanse that lead directly to Equestrian ground. As a matter of fact, this was a border of the Frozen North never often exploited, and it seemed that in order to reach it, they must have gotten lost in the forest that was meant to take them to the border city of Pierce Heaven. Quickly, he put together that this meant they were infinitely closer to release from this terrible predicament, even quicker he realized that their only issue was taking care of the roadblock, and swiftly, he began to theorize as to how they could bypass it - perhaps, with some relatively complex magical manipulation, the null-zone of the forest could be denied, and—

“Prince Blueblood?” Raven’s voice rang sharply in his ears, and Blueblood fell straight off the couch, coughing up spittle and staring at her alarmedly. She returned the stare with one of her own, eyebrows raised and furrowed, a strangely tense look on her face, suggesting that—

“Another treatment, sir. Lay back down on the couch and I will get the apparatus. Do not touch anything and you get a sandwich,” she said monotonously, backing away from him with a hoof carefully outstretched, eyes now clearly piercing his, as if facing down a large territorial animal.

“But I’m—”

“It’s a very good sandwich, Prince Blueblood, I assure you. Just lay down and keep quiet.” The stallion was left to sigh and do his best to increase trust in himself among his closest peer, shuffling back atop the couch. He could not help but feel a little empty inside for how they treated him. Albeit his was effectively what his performance as… anything, called for. A prince in name only, causing all these disasters. It was only right. Only right that they—

Raven forcefully lifted his head and stuck the device’s hose onto his snout, pressing his head down. As it began to hum unpleasantly, she got herself to stop staring at the Prince’s face.

The extremely disturbing fact that, evidently, being probed by ancient wizards left an alarming chunk of their magic within one’s system, was moving over as her top issue. Now she had multiple big problems to deal with, not just the fact that the pony she was meant to guard was turning into a radioactive, possibly possessed mess.

Having found a demolished bunker hidden in the rocks behind the roadblock was definitely one contestant. It was built to overlook the patch of forest before the roadblook - clearly, somebody’s unsanctioned attempt at security. If it was sanctioned, she would have known. Moreover, it was made out of materials Equestria simply did not possess, as was the roadblock, in fact. The roadblock, curiouly, was much fresher than the bunker. Alien presences in the region were to be expected, but so established and consistent?..

That issue sorted itself out, rather unfortunately so. The extremely sturdy material had been subjected to force that could only have come from a similarly officially nonexistent weapon. Five times larger in shell size than the regular griffon-made marksman gun, and packed with impact holes from shells that exact size to boot. Something had been made that destroyed something that could not have been made. Worse yet, it was not an anomalous presence, not as far as they knew. The bunker, at the very least, was pony-built.

They found a body underneath the debris. A single pony casualty of the apparent assault.

The engineers said that the armor he was equipped with was entirely unheard of and borderline inconceivable by Equestria’s standards - safe for not having been hit by the massive shells, it appeared that he only died due to the debris burying him and impaling his helmet. The dark green and grey was also of a design never seen anywhere else, making the pony himself look like something out of a cheesy comic book, only all too disturbing in real life. The secretary, herself that is, managed to recover an identity document from the mess that was his body.

That pony - Rough Rider - had gone missing months ago from the Canterlot Royal Guard, and was repeatedly reported to have outstanding service records, entirely countered by horrific discipline records. His family never filed a missing pony warrant, leaving it to an anonymous tip for his disappearance to even be recognized. The document went to her pocket, to be returned to the family and give them resolution whether they wanted to or not. In the end, this finding, however grim it was, raised a whole new bunch of questions and implications. There was an awful lot of vital information they could not even have come up with prior.

The fact that they were crossing an entirely accursed, dead, wild region with a radiating Prince and far too many things coming on without warning… As unfortunate as it was, it cost them their social integrity. In short, Raven and the rest had an extremely unpleasant talk, and the gist of it was that both parties were equally displeased with the other’s choices as to what they should do next. The tech team won thirteen to one, and evidently, they were going to bust through the barricade somehow. If only that was the only major significant issue with their group, that would have been fine. She would just have had to dig a lot of graves and lead on all by herself from then on. Unfortunately, surprises were all too plentiful, and all to unpleasant to be thought about.

As such, she came back with an excuse of treating the Prince with an apparatus that was slowly starting to feel like overly noisy placebo. Thankfully, it gave her time to distract herself and reset her mind. It was rare that that happened, but Raven was close to developing a nervous tic. Not anywhere near a breakdown just yet, of course, but a tic was well on its way.

“We are going to need a miracle at this rate, I think,” she mumbled to herself while still holding Blueblood’s head tight as disturbing light poured out of his wide stretched mouth into the isolator machine. “Somehow I think the only ones we’re finding here are the bad kind.”

While the device finally disconnected from Blueblood with a loud “cha-pop”, leaving him unconscious as it always did, she looked at the direction engine room behind the bathroom quarter. Shaking her head, the mare sighed and left a sandwich on the table in front of where the Prince lay, and went to the main section of the carrier. Despite the constant repairs and the occasional retrofit upgrade changing things every now and again, the vehicle had become a second home to most of them. The fact that there was a bit more than just a door dividing the so-called house was going to be a problem, but, thankfully, none of the tech ponies were present there as of yet.

Without much direction, she shrugged and flicked on a small radio that had been entirely useless ever since they entered the wastelands. The rabid, wild air of the Frozen North ate up and distorted even the most powerful of magic communications, to say nothing of primitive radio waves.

Raven’s eyebrow rushed far, far upwards when she heard non-static noises come out of the thing. She fiddled with the frequency a little, and eventually got a clear transmission. It was music. The mare was a bit overcome with the fact that anything got through at all, and the implications of it, remarkably many of them positive, but even through that she could tell it was not very good. The music, that was. Before she got to purging that thought from her mind and informing the rest, she realized that the (poorly) singing male voice sung in a language she could not recognize at all - and that was with her being at least quintlingual. Something nearby was equipped with a receiver so powerful, it caught wavs from extremely far away.

“I don’t care where you’re catching this from,” she muttered to herself, hurrying towards the door. “But if somebody’s transmitting this from nearby, I won’t mind a freaking deer getting us out.”

Just as the mare got herself out the door, coat fortunately on, an extremely loud noise made her brace against the frame of the carrier and grind her teeth. It was a roar, a boom, a screech, a series of chugs, and, most of all, a heavy crash, as if something slammed into one of the massive, spindly trees, and brought one of them down.

Her hearing recovered by when she reached the other end of the vehicle, and just in time - all the warning she had before a heated metal slug, reeking of ozone, flew by her face, was a yell.

“That all your surprises?” a rough, hoarse, heavily accented male voice barked from a small elevation above where they had stopped.

“The hell did you shoot her for?!” Raven heard the chief engineer shout out, somewhat able to hear him over the quickened heartbeat she was trying to fight, pressing herself to the metal of the carrier on the other side.

“I don’t like me any surprises,” the voice replied in what was, quite painfully, some crude manner of impersonation. “Now she comes out alright.” The mare pondered for a moment what that sentence meant, as the roguish accent and the messy intonation made it unclear if he was ensuring that she was not hit, or telling her to come out.

“Who are you and what do you want?” she shouted from her cover, peeking her head out and getting a look at who exactly almost killed her.

“My name is not important,” the attacker replied in, once again, an obvious impersonation, although this time a much different one. By that point, it had come from confusing to unsettling. “I come for you.”

“And what does that mean, exactly? The hell are you pointing that motherload at us?” the chief engineer shouted at him in Raven’s stead.

“No funny business when I’m on the job,” was another voice-shifty reply. “You’re coming with me.”

“Cause you have a gun and we don’t?” the bulky stallion asked venomously, whereas Raven took short steps towards the other end of the vehicle, trying to get to the opening from a presumably blind side. On the way, she locked Blueblood in.

“Nope,” the attacker replied. “I’ve got me many.”

The mare covered her face with a hoof, partly in reaction to just how their newest problem sounded, and partly to cool her head off with a bit of snow. She had been trying to figure out which species he was, but the weird tone and pitch shifts with nearly each phrase made it difficult. What impediments and abnormalities carried over, though, made him pretty Capric. Rough vowels, some palatalized consonants, an entirely backwards syllabic and rhythmic pattern.

It would have made sense, too - the goat vassal state was relatively close to the Frozen North border. Only there was a slight problem with trying to deduce where the threat came from, which was that despite being Equestrian territory, the most even she ever heard of that nation was news from the capital city of Gueldergrad. And, if truth was to be told, it always unnerved her how neat and clean everything sounded, and how little effort ever went into making any sort of contact with what was their own state.

She never minded it before, not seeing the goats as major players on the political stage, or as personal adversaries when sent on missions for the Princess, but currently it was very much a problem.

Peeking around the corner and looking at him again revealed that the problem was rather massive.

“What do you need from us?” the chief engineer asked.

“Aeehhh…” the goat fumbled, his voice shifting into a much more consistent, higher-pitched, smoked-out tenor “You. I need you. You’re coming with me. That clear? You’re being… ehh… rescued. Right. You’re all being rescued.”

For starters, the goat was pointing an absolutely gargantuan gun at them as he said so. It sat on one of his broad shoulders, but in sheer size, it was nearly half as big as its wielder. Raven was not a gun expert, not being a griffon and all, but one thing was clear to her - this was far beyond what any kind of official modern gunsmithing was capable of. Its many end holes spun, whirring slightly, and steam came out of its back. A big box hanging on his flank was connected to it with a wide, flat cloth.

“Okay… Okay. We’ll come quietly… but we have one more,” the stallion negotiated further.

“Yes, you do. He’s like this, right?” The goat spoke in what must have been his original voice, and pulled out a picture of Prince Blueblood with one hoof. The fact that he kept balance standing on three hooves while still keeping the gun aimed was intimidating. The fact that the picture was a photo, and taken from an upwards angle, and recently so, judging by Blueblood’s clothes - but not his physical state - was disturbing. A meek green filter was platered over it, but Blueblood slouched over on a couch was visible.

“What do you need him for?”

“Same thing, stupid. We got room for all here.”

The next problem was that he was right, and there was room for all. Parked next to the goat was… a landship. A legitimate landship, like in the schematics she had once seen shared by griffon engineers. Only real and in the metal, and… far more advanced. It was not as pompous as expansive as their carrier, but taller, wider, more efficient-looking. Its design was angular, and the greyish-green camo paintjob made it look smaller than it actually was. Many window-holes on its sides had other guns peeking out, with red lights flashing above them. On top of it was an absolute giant of a cannon, located on a rotating platform. Scratches and bumps peppered the hull, the expected signs of passing through the Frozen North. Only it seemed that, unlike their vehicle, it had not yet required any extensive repair.

Last Raven checked, their vehicle was the most advanced that ever treaded any Equestrian ground. No others were meant to have been produced. Especially not by their own forgotten states. She had officially developed that tic, and her eye began to twitch.

“Tell her to come out.”

“I’m coming out, I’m coming out,” Raven announced, stifling a sigh. The original plan, which was to sneak around and take him down while he was distracted, was not panning out particularly well. She held her head down and put up a hoof to show she was not armed, but still felt the gun point its many maws at her, causing her gut to sink a little.

“All the family here yet?” another twist of the voice took over the goat.

“Ah… The Prince, we need him too,”

“Yeah, right. Pull him out.” The goat accentuated that with a swing of his gun, which did not even tip him. An engineer he pointed it at got up and slowly backpedaled, going to get Blueblood.

The goat himself was part of the reason the sneak attack was not working. Whoever he was, and however strange his way about Equestrian was, he was a bit of a problem. Standing in the rather chilling cold, on his body were only a white and blue striped legless shirt, a set of winter goggles, and a belt with copious pockets. On top of his head was a blue beret with an ornate set of laurels surrounding two crossed scythes - the Capric national emblem. While goats were normally taller and less muscular than ponies, this one was massive in both regards. Without even meaning to seek them out, Raven could spot bits of his biceps even through the thick dark coat. That coat was razor-cut below his neck, making a tatoo-alike of a bell with an equine skull within it.

Once again, Raven was not an expert in northern parts of the world, but plain common sense said that this was not someone to be trifled with. Definitely not alone.

They exchanged looks with the chief engineer. The mare stared at the stallion, both showing some considerable disdain for one another. She was not necessarily too happy about having to be stuck there with these ponies, not only being sick of the present company, but also having learned a thing or two about them during the big argument. He had the same thoughts, no doubt. Still, he nodded once. The secretary’s heart ran a little quick, but she calmed herself before it would be noticed.

Blueblood evidently went through his own set of discoveries as he was being forced out of the carrier, but kept quiet. Apparently, having approximately eight gunholes stare at him forced all the disbelief to remain pent up. That… complicated things a little, as him complaining and making a large fuss would have been beneficial. Raven was forced to make a move.

“You need the Prince alive, right?” she spoke slowly, calmly, trying to be as unsuspicious as possible.

“I said, you were getting rescued. You deaf?” the goat replied, slurring a little. He also managed to keep track of all of the ponies present while so doing.

“You pointing this big freaking gun at us isn’t helping that fact,” the chief engineer said with a grunt.

The goat looked first at him, then at Raven, then at the Prince, then at all the others. He especially centered around the Prince, who was still a little groggy after his treatment, and bore a few of the marks of previous encounters.

“I want no funny business, understand?” he said in what accounted for a normal voice, somewhat more high-pitched than the many apparently token phrases he had been using.

With that, he kicked the gun on the side, and the barrels quit spinning. He backpedaled and kicked his vehicle, causing a door to open vertically, falling right down on the snow and causing a pile to roll down. It hit the Prince right at the end, but not even that had him swearing, or complaining, or speaking at all. He was dug out, and in the meantime, Raven returned to her original point:

“The Prince is sick. I have to get his medication, or it will not end well.”

“I know your sick. Go on, get to the carriage!” the goat’s voice took a complete turn for the lower pitch, almost slipping into another accent. “Ziegel, ziegel, ai lu lu!”

From then on, there was no more communicating in any language, as every attempt at prolonging the conversation was shut down. Once again under gunpoint, many of them, they were lead into the inner part of his vehicle, with considerably worry in tow. Nobody had any delusions about this being rescue - not even Blueblood, if he would speak at all, instead of limiting himself to skulking and staring. The list of problems was ever growing, even in spite of how, after the door was locked, the goat left the vehicle. Nobody felt very adventurous, seeing how the steamwork turret guns peeking out of most windows were clearly equipped to rotate.

The only thing to fill up the awkward silence to follow the capric’s departure was the view from the few clear windows - their carrier was moving over, and getting attached to be towed. A weight fell off not only her heart, but most others. In the case that they found a way out, they would not be monumental failures in the eyes of their command.

The interior of the landship, which they had some time to examine, was about as perturbing as its owner. Most tech ponies looked for tools to abuse and take over the driver when he returned, but nothing appeared to be much sharper or heavier than a hoof or a horn. A small room absolutely full of firearms was barred away, and nobody had welding equipment on them. Just to annoy Raven, each and every one of those looked infinitely more advanced than any firearm she had ever seen, and she got to see early prototypes mere months ago.

The interior itself was very spacious - larger than the two sections of their own vehicle combined. Much wider, too. This was not going to be a repeat of the black hole incident Raven had years ago during her travel to a southern ruin, at the very least. There were two more small rooms - a storage room full of heavily canned food, including meat, and a restroom. Raven was no tech pony, but everyone else was - their gazes were all over the place, and more than a few had their jaws hanging out. She never asked anyone for a clarification, knowing how well that would end. Not that they could help her. Not these ponies.

Improbable technology beyond official Equestrian understanding, however, was not all there was to be taken by. The area they were staying in was… “customized”, Raven found a euphemism.

Posters of varying degrees of quality, appropriateness, and age, littered the walls when Sad-Arabic-looking carpets (who would hang a carpet on a wall?) were not. Notes written in what must have been Capric were pinned down at random. A big refrigerator unit was bolted into the floor near the sink. Glass bottles were in abundance, placed in plastic boxes. Borderline ancient dirty dishes were in a sink in the corner of the “room”. Two couches were at the opposite sides of the room. A single carpet was where it belonged, on the floor, albeit it only covered the very center despite its massive size. Books (some with Equestrian titles) and magazines (mostly comic books, upon further inspection) were held in glass casings on bookshelves that were nailed onto the walls, atop the carpets. The sheer size of the comic book pile, with even a box of what must have been videotapes - something that Equestrian playmakers were enthusiastic about before the market was overflooded with low quality production - gave her an idea as to where the goat learned Equestrian from, as well as the source of his mannerisms. A flatscreen projector hanging from the ceiling, complete with a tarnished Griffon-made “entertainment center” bolted into the floor, was directly adjacent. Clear signs of misuse were on both highly modern devices.

All of it positively stunk of alcohol, smoke, and ozone. Come to think of it, the same applied to its owner. By when he returned, Raven and the engineers had finally murmured a bit more between themselves.

“Okay, the gang’s all here. Now, no funny business, no goofy times, and everything is ooky-spooky,” he said, still pointing the humongous gun on them, and slowly advancing into the driver’s cabin. There was another small room between it and where the ponies were held - in it, a bunk, a sink, a refrigerator, and some other implements were located.

“Alright. No problem,” the chief engineer said, nodding. “Where are we going?”

“Where you belong.”

Whether Raven wanted to or not, her chest panged when he passed near her, pointing the gun her way as he did so. As if the many other guns were not enough.

“Equestria?”

“Uhuh. Right.” Once again, the goat’s voice made it utterly impossible to tell what he meant.

“Okay. We’ll settle down.” Upon hearing that, the secretary prepped her limbs a bit.

Just as the goat turned to point the gun at the bigger clump of ponies, who had moved as far to the side as they feasibly could, she heard a very soft tap on the floor. Her heart beat fast, not racing yet, but less than happy with where she was going.

Still, she lunged ahead, hoping that the guns could not turn all the way around, and throwing herself right at the goat. With great fortune, Raven did live to the part where she jabbed her horn in the side of his neck, and a sharp pen in a supposed weak point by the chest. The chief engineer then rammed into his other side, aiming for the head with a heavy bottle.

Less fortunately, a painful thud sent sparkles into Raven’s eyes when her horn hit the goat, and she felt the metal ink pen palpably bend upon impact. A pained yell sounded out, a male one, but her blurry vision showed the bulky stallion falling back on his haunches, a big red mark on his forehead, with two harsher parts at the top of it. Horn roots. The goat swore in his language, tilting a little himself, having lost some of the balance to the attack. A few bits of glass were stuck in his forehead, but most other parts of the extremely thick bottle that was used to assault him simply fell down on the floor.

Without another alternative, and fully realizing that she was charging someone whose skin was hard enough to deflect a rather sharp horn, Raven attacked again. This time, she was pushed into a corner, and decided that another series of monotonous neurolinguistics sessions with Blueblood were worth it - she went for the jugular vein. Instead, she found the goat’s forehead, and was flung meters back, head pounding after the heavy hit, and screeching due to all the gunfire in the room.

It was all or nothing, them either getting murdered or taking both vehicles for themselves lest they meet with a terrible fate. Now, it seemed, they had the added bonus of having to wait until said terrible fate. Not that there was any chance that they were being taken anywhere good to begin with. Only now, their escort would be less than pleased with them.

On the bright side, said escort appeared to be more or less impenetrable, so—

“Ах ты ж епт…” she heard a heavy blast, and then - the goat cough out in definite pain and his gun bang against the wall. A heavy crash and a lot of metal noises followed.

By when Raven got her head up, Prince Blueblood was already racing towards her, a forcibly turned around turret right behind him, smoking a little. He shook her, looking worried, but only worsening the immense headache and the rotating stars in her eyes. She became worried just as well - at the glow in his eyes, and at the slight mist leaving his mouth. This was a new relapse record.

Now they were having Blueblood issues, less than an hour after the last suction. At least one issue seemed to have dealt with the oth—

A sharp metallic sound sounded thrice from different parts of the room, and a guttural growl came from the driver’s cabin. Raven lifted her head and groaned. When the goat stumbled, having taken a slug, that was where he landed. In the driver’s cabin. Where he was headed.

Evidently, he landed headfirst onto whichever of the many, many buttons on the driver’s panel raised huge, electrified metal bars out of slots in the floor. Now, he stood upright, having just a few seconds ago pushed the slug out of the side of his chest. Blood poured out of it, but not too extensively. Not a lethal wound.

“Okay…” she heard the goat mumble out after gulping audibly. Blueblood helped her up, all too cautiously and reliably, and let her lean against him while she regained her vision. “I say I am rescuing you… I free up my fucking room for you… and then… Да пошли вы нахуй, блять.” He waved a hoof at them discardingly. “Now sit there and think what you’ve done. Don’t want to see your asses no more. Enjoy the fucking road.”

With that, a huge black sheet of metal blocked the view of the driver’s cabin beyond the electrified bars. All of the sentry guns, including the one that peeked out just enough for what must have been its rotating switch to be visible, retracted sharply into the hull. The same bars locked out the free windows, before and after the thick glass, and the other rooms.

“Food in the fridge, if you need the toilet - you ping me. No. Funny. Business. Fucking horses,” Raven heard his voice come from the bathroom door, heavily distorted. Evidently, that was a speaker.

Soon enough, the rest of the ponies came to. They all had a big staredown, Raven drilling the engineering team and them drilling her. Nobody said a word, not even Blueblood, who had sunk into a corner, surrounded by posters. The big stallion was the first to break the silence.

“Well, I guess nobody wins now.”

“Uhuh. That’s great, isn’t it. Not we don’t get to be rebels, do we?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, sure. You keep telling yourself that’s what we need. You know what? We don’t need this. Do we, guys?” he looked at his suite, who kept quiet as they normally did, albeit in a slightly less convenient fashion this time around. “We are going to find a way out of this hole. You sit in this corner along with him, and do what you do best. You know what that is.”

“I can’t exactly do that right now, can I?”

“I meant be freaking useless. You can do that anytime. Now excuse me, but we have an utter pile of manure to explore.”

“Anybody touches anything I don’t like, they get a hole in their head,” the goat’s voice from the speakers reminded them of his existence. Behind the accent and the distortion, it was barely audible, but a series of chirps from the hull made the point very clear. Clearly, there was no more luck with just a single gun being ever so slightly out of place - enough for their dimmest member to turn it against the driver in a disturbing display of intelligence. Said member sat in his corner, staring at the rest of the ponies with unpleasantly glowing eyes, a wispy mist coming out of his mouth still. The secretary could only scowl at the thought of how had she stopped him from ever encountering the… lich, this, and his unnerving mental symptoms, could have been prevented. At the rate they were going, being executed via gunfire may have been more preferable than having a wounded - military? special forces? bandit? - goat carry them to their doom.

Eventually, Raven just crashed herself on the allotted couch, and buried her face in her hooves. Her head ached like death, her options were very limited, her companions were either distrustful or infected by some ancient magic. In short, her task was becoming very difficult to accomplish.

Then the music came on - all too similar to what she heard on the radio less than an hour back - and life became utter misery. The mare laid down on the couch, and covered her head with her hooves entirely, not even throwing off the coat that she still wore. Around her, metal noises were prevalent, and a much different chug of the mechanical engine started to come alive, covering up the muttering of the dozen of technicians who, no doubt, examined the construct in clearer detail. Soon, the landship had begun to rock, having began to move, and her body finally conceded, drifting away. A soft touch of a big hoof brushing her head was not enough to pull her out.

She woke up in what must have been very early morning, as there was actual sunlight coming through the windows, when they weren’t occupied by guns. Absolutely nothing had changed about the room, as it seemed that the tech ponies found nothing they could exploit. If they had, they would have said something. With how she spent at least half an hour visibly awake, but not moving due to her headache, that was not happening. They were instead mostly asleep, some of them playing cards that one of them must have had in a pocket when they were taken. All the attention she received from that side of the room was a tired glare from the chief engineer, who was looking out a window and into the white expanse. Apparently, they had left the forest.

The landship was rocking ever more, much more stably than their carrier ever did. That caused her to turn sleepy very shortly, and, with the help of the alcoholic, ozonic smell ever present in the room, made any thought a difficult one. Then again, all she had on her mind was rather unpleasant. Nothing was there to alleviate the grim atmosphere.

Blueblood did try to come in contact with her, but she could not help but shudder away from him - by that point, the glowing of his increasingly sad eyes made him visible even from his dark corner. A few previously half-empty reeking bottles were near him. So it did disturb her more that he wished to give her an alcohol-washed rag for her head wound. Just the fact that the Prince somehow managed to arrive at that first aid solution. Then again, from her observation of his behavior after the unfortunate accident, that was a noticeable symptom.

Thankfully, he took no for an answer, and she spent the rest of the day in relative peace, curled up on the couch and listening to the terrible music the goat’s radio was somehow receiving. Occasionally, his voice would come through on the speaker, but unless it was someone needing to use the restroom, it was nothing more than incoherent mutterings in a language none of them understood.

Raven attempted to get up and prepare food, but found that one of the engineers had taken up position as cook.

Those were all the events of what her biological clock was the entirety of the next day. Spent in the alcoholic odor that far outmatched anything Blueblood ever smelled like at the onset of their “adventure” and affected by the constant rocking, it passed quickly.

The next day was not a major change in that regard. The engineers had begun to give up on reverse-engineering anything the landship’s interior had to offer, and the metal bars continued to be very visibly electrified. To cope, most of them had begun to peruse the comic and regular books, although the majority were less than pleased. Some argued about how exactly the projector must have been broken, and nearly arrived at a conclusion, but the chief engineer discarded the idea of fixing their kidnapper’s stuff. In the end, their main technical accomplishment was creating a makeshift flashlight to be able to read in the dark, which, in that part of the North, was what five sixths of the day consisted of.

Blueblood was entirely quiet, still sitting in his corner and looking gloomily at the rest of them. That unnerved Raven progressively more and more the sadder he got. Fortunately, the headache helped combat that. By that point, the Prince was simply emitting too much magical and regular radiation for anyone to approach him all too safely.

Slowly, she was starting to realize that their main mode of escape would be either if the driver would be killed and the systems disabled by some creature or event, or if he died from radiation poisoning due to Blueblood. In both cases, they were more or less doomed as well. Still, Raven clung to hope, wishing for something to happen that would break them out. This was, after all, the Frozen North. Something had to be dangerous enough. Where they were going… she did not want to end up.

When they evidently passed through an entire pack of much the same wolves they had encountered many days ago, and left the entire pack “shredded to guts and bits”, according to the engineer that was looking out a window at the moment, that hope simmered down a bit. A few hails of gunfire and what must have been very unsavory words from the driver, and all pony heads in the vehicle were pounding, while all the wolves outside were demolished. Unless there was extreme overexaggeration in place, it was not a good sign for most physical things to come up against the landship. It also explained how the goat got to their position with just a few scratches and bumps. To think that a sattelite nation somehow possessed machinery that allowed one to traverse the Frozen North almost effortlessly...

Since this show of firepower left only terrain, weather, magic, and Blueblood as possible solutions to the problem - all of those would absolutely inevitably take toll on them as well - Raven decided to go with gross overexaggeration, and stared back at the engineer part of the room with increased disdain. They had not shared more than a few words over the entirety of the two days.

On day three, Raven’s head wound appeared to have been reduced to very plain painful thump here and there. Only it was with a slight sizzle on her forehead that she woke up, and Blueblood looking guiltily at her. The mare checked herself nervously for radiation poisoning, thankfully, to no avail.

Not that it much mattered. Some hours into her having been awake, they entered an absolute blizzard of a flash freeze. Even inside the thickly plated vehicle, which was heated in a manner not unlike their own was, the temperature dropped quite significantly. They could clearly hear ice cracking outside - and, according to the engineering team’s highly disturbed announcement, that was the moisture around the four wheels turning into huge clumps of ice before the wheels finished a full cycle. And yet, all that resulted in was more bumps in the road.

That said, it also resulted into all of the ponies having to gather in the middle, because the temperature really was low for a long time. Everyone but Blueblood, of course, who understandingly curled up in his corner. Raven was let into the fold, but felt decidedly unwelcome there. The incredibly awkward huddling up went on for about three hours, where only the engineers’ talking about brain-melting things engineers talk about, all allongside the similarly brain-melting radio kept her company. When the flash freeze ended, most of them lost consciousness to the severe, harsh change of temperature.

Raven awoke on day four, but only knew that because Blueblood told her that when she woke up, blinking incoherently. That was how she found out that it was the by now positively glowing prince who would daily bring her breakfast before she woke up. They shared a very heated exchange in which she tried, in horror, to escape what was effectively a plate of magical radiation (regular radiation would have aired out of Blueblood by now, Raven knew), while he tried his best to convince her to eat something. Eventually, she had to shriek at him to back off and never touch anything again until they could get the suction device back, causing the stallion to depart to his corner, crying audibly. He covered himself with a muddled poster of some circus announcement with an elephant-like creature on it that fell of the wall. However they related by that point, Raven could not bear looking at him in such a state.

So she laid on the couch, spending the few of her thoughts that remained alive in the repugnant odor by trying to imagine all the possible ways she could exploit any sort of hiccup on the vehicle’s part. It could not have been perfectly designed - something had to give out at one point or another. They crossed many regions, going through places they had not even paid attention to on the map, and yet nothing of note happened to the landship. Some gunfire would occasionally sound, but by that point, all of them were so dazed that it simply did not much register. The engineers took it a bit worse for wear, as, unlike Raven or Blueblood, they were not in a repulsive social vaccuum. As such, they were more sane.

The mare herself was becoming more and more sure that something was turning cranky inside her head. All the hurdles she had overcome, one way or another, to be ended by an armed forces renegade whose knowledge of Equestrian came from terrible comic books and even worse videoplays. She figured out his origin by then - the bits of uniform and the overly accurate firing and driving pointed towards him being a high-skilled, arguably high-ranking deserter. Probably a mercenary, however wild it was to imagine such an institute existing in Equestria, and outside of comic books. Her encounter career may have been topped with the ancient, prehistoric, uneasy implication-instilling Arabian lich, but this looked to be where it would end.

At least, she thought, there would be not much shame in living after her mission had failed entirely. Something told her everyone but the Prince would end up disposable. That particular thought did not make life’s prospects much brighter, and so she ended up dozing off, distanced from everyone else in the room.

That day’s unpleasant revelation about the landship came in how an all too familiar sort of howl started to emit from outside, echoey and full of angst. Another wraith - more than one, in fact. Even in her state, covering ears with hooves out of sheer reflex, she heard their voices clearly. They curdled her stomach, and sent chills down the spine. Pony voices, too. Someone Equestrian. It was not all too clear, but she heard the same phrases repeated over and over.

In a half hour of exposure, the whirlwind of ghastly “Why did you bring them?”, “I can’t reach the Command”, “...you never told us...”, “Come again, TACCOM?”, and the like became absolutely omnipresent, some of the room’s furniture turning faintly green. Faint bits of obscure encyclopaedic knowledge suggested that they were passing by a pack of old wraiths, and at least some of the disjointed, garbled speech must have been what kept cycling in their minds long after their deaths. Ghostly, reminiscently armored silhouettes began to seep into their cabin through the hull, stretching out their hooves violently toward the ponies, and avoiding Blueblood’s corner entirely. It looked predictably grim, until the driver’s voice shouted through the speaker at deafening volumes:

“А вот хер вам, бесота поганая!”

While none of them knew what that meant, all of the passengers were thrown against the walls and furniture, one of the engineers nearly breaking the projection screen. For a few moments, it felt as if they were in flight, as the rocking disappeared entirely, and the vehicle’s center of weight shifted drastically. A severe crash, however, had them thrown against various other objects, and the pur of the motor soon resumed. Remarkably, the projection screen now appeared to be working.

The driver/abductor did not hear news of this until the next day, though, as, evidently, the only pony awake after that particular romp was Prince Blueblood. When Raven awoke, he was sitting in front of the projector, while the engineers had all backed down into the kitchen area, shouting for her to wake up. Strangely enough, the mare felt as if she woke up on her own. Perhaps, it was the blurred, slowed down nature of her perceived reality that caused that. Even as she got up, she felt less than well. Her assumption was radiation exposure.

“He’s… doing… something. I don’t know how he figured this crap out,” the large pony said to her with the side of his mouth, looking more than worried. “You’re the expert on creepy magic stuff here. The hell is this?”

“I thought…” Raven was about to remind him that she was useless, but a wave of nausea came over her. “I… I think… I think his infection is turning him into… I don’t know… probably a magic source like what caused the anomaly? Ancient non-unicorn magic is not my forte.”

“Well, I don’t think we’re allowed back to our old carriage no more. He won’t listen anymore, no matter how hard we try. What a dumb way to go...” He shook his head, evidently following much the same train of thought as Raven over the days. His head looked just about as bad, too. He seemed to have come up with sanitizer just as well as Blueblood did.

The secretary sighed, staring at Blueblood staring at the screen. Then, she looked at the tech crew. Something became apparent.

Despite the… violent, and less than disclosurable, nature of their argument days prior, they had been clumped up together in a large, but not any less foul den. Over the days, they kept up the disdain, especially after their attempts at teamwork lead to the situation turning for the worse. Whether she liked it or not, but her negativity toward them, much like the opposite, was starting to run on fumes.

If they were going to go, they would at least have to do so amicably.

“You’re talking again?” the Prince asked, still sitting still and staring at the screen, watching some mindless movie without sound, subtitles pasted poorly at the bottom.

“Might as well,” the chief engineer sighed, shrugging.

“Finally. You know, for ponies from a nation that values friendship so highly,” Blueblood said in a calm, slightly higher pitched voice, likely deteriorated from days of non-use. “You sure didn’t take long to get at each other’s throats. I’m glad to see none of you stab another in the back, but still…” He sighed, in a slightly shrill voice, coughing slightly. “None of us are all that good at this.”

“What is he talking about?..” the bulky stallion whispered to Raven, finally being able to vent his unease.

“Don’t mind him, he is not himself when this happens… I believe,” she whispered back.

“By “this” I mean very, very basic things, Buster,” Blueblood answered calmly, cocking his head a bit, mist seeping out of most his orifices by then. “I think we must be around close now. I feel as much. The ship veers a little every now and then. I take it as change of direction. If I’ve been right in following the patterns… And if I remember the map…”

“How does he remember my name,” the chief engineer said plainly, staring right at Raven.

“He looked at the map?..” she spoke out in unison with him.

The Prince sighed while there was very slight unrest among the rest of the ponies. His bright gaze turned toward a window, beyond which only pitch blackness was visible.

“This is a good place, I think.”

With that, he rose up, stopping the previously dysfunctional projector and recorder at a frame of a video where an oddly shaped compass lay covered in someone’s blood. The mare was not paying much attention to it previously, but that frame set chills down her spine. Everyone let him pass to the bathroom door, and press the red button. He scratched his temple with a hoof, and took a deep breath. Subtly, he turned to Raven, and said:

“If this doesn’t work, remember me as a failure.”

The speaker audibly came alive, but before anything came from the other end, the unicorn spoke first:

“I’ve fixed the projector. Want to check it out?”

“You what?”

“Fixed the projector. It took some time, but that was the least I could do for giving us a ride.”

“Somebody got a brain in there?”

“We’ve always had them. It just takes time for a pony to adjust to new environments. I apologize on behalf of my followers. We could take a break. You have been driving with a sum of six hours slept. That’s not great.”

“I’m fine.”

“But you’ll get us there more reliably if you’re not sleep-deprived. You know that for a fact.”

“I’m not… derprived. You’re derpraved.”

“The recorder is working too, by the way.”

The landship stopped with a halting screech. The ponies shook in place a bit, but nobody fell, and everyone kept to the walls, while staring at Blueblood. As for him, he calmly walked toward the entrance to the driver’s cabin, and stood right in front of it. The stallion only flinched a little when the bars sparked one last time, and retracted.

Something came together in Raven’s head, and she followed him. So did the chief engineer, whose name even she had left out of her memory prior to Blueblood’s sudden rediscovery. With nods, a few of the engineers spread out closer to the room, not suspiciously enough to be instantly noticed.

The metal sheet slid up, and the significantly disheveled goat stumbled out of the cabin. Somehow, he had gained a stubble atop his thick coat, and still wore the beret. His goggles, however, were currently missing, hanging from a pine-tree air freshener that dangled across the windshield. His now visible blue eyes readjusted to the relative darkness of their room, but not for too long. Right away, he caught eye of Blueblood.

“Ебать-колотить…” he whispered something, legs giving way for a second, jaw hanging open. So did Raven’s, as she noticed a large red scar on his forehead, but not for long. Instantly, everyone went in to wrestle with him, dragging the massive goat into their room. Strangely so, it was not so much of a fight, as the goat instinctively tried to scramble away from Blueblood, who stared him in the eyes with his own, glowing orange by that point.

“Get. H-him. Out.” The Prince shuddered as he did so, his head and ears twitching, eyes never once blinking. Hoarse, coughing bleats were all that their kidnapper responded with, trying to blabber out something none of them would understand in any case.

Before the ponies could respond, the goat blinked, and his own eyes took on an orange glow. Suddenly, he turned around and rammed a section of a wall repeatedly, until a switch ejected from it. Hitting that switch caused the door to open wide, letting a snowstorm into the room, and somehow turning it even darker. The goat needed no further convincing, trotting outside on wobbly legs, breathing heavily. The door closed behind him, a section of it remaining open, hard glass separating it from the outside world. It turned out that that entire time, they could have had a bigger window.

The moment that happened, Blueblood fell face down on the floor, grunting in pain in a much shriller voice than his own already was. The glow and mist became weaker, albeit not absent, and the abject silence was interrupted by the sound of hooves against metal as Buster rushed into the driver’s cabin, ushering the rest after him.

Raven was about to start contemplating just what exactly had happened to the Prince after ancient magic touched him right through the mouth, but her attention was taken when the glow was removed from Blueblood completely - just as more hammering began to sound. This time, it was hooves against glass.

“What did you do?!” the goat’s muffled, accented voice came from the other side. He was already covered in snow. “How the fuck?!”

The mare just stared back at him, busy with the same question. Their abductor stared at her from the other side, growing more and more of an ice coat by the second. He breathed heavily, looking to his sides, and hung his head for a few moments.

“You were going to kill us, weren’t you. You’ve killed before,” she pressed her hooves against the glass, and stared right at him. It was a better alternative than finding out what was going on with the Prince. Her mind was so eager to get away from the issue of Blueblood that something finally clicked within it. “You set up that roadblock, you took out that outpost. I know who you are.”

“You can go fuck yourself!”

“What didn’t you like in your special forces? What wasn’t good enough? Why would you… take all this and take off into this damned waste? You knew how this would end.”

“They’re idiots! You’re… idiots! You don’t do anything, we never do anything! Nothing! Nothing is going on!” he rammed against the glass, but his nation’s design proved to be too hard even for that. “You… We have no lives! You don’t have a life! And now… me too! Fuck you!”

Raven scowled, lowering her head, listening to the freezing goat rant. With how his military was evidently making research years beyond what it was ever expected to, and with how it was expected to never, in fact, be used, she could but sigh. Even more so over the fact that documents like the case of a “newspaper rumor” about a Capric military office having a “mishap” were always to be sorted for the trash bin. Only she read them anyway.

Rough Rider, the pony whose life he had taken, was the same, she realized. It would have been poetic had it not been sickening. Both of them were rendered useless by the machine which she was a cog of. Of the hundreds of cases that went through her before being destined for paper-mache, many were similar. There had always been dissent, there had always been problems, and not only with their national militaries. All of it was locked away and discarded so that there could be peace of mind.

Not in here, there would not be. The Frozen North, she was starting to realize, was where things nobody wanted to talk about had to go. They did all too good a job of making anywhere else unwelcome. They did a good job, Raven realized. She did a good job. Only not for her own sake at the moment.

The fact that all of this had to even be considered - “Machines” and “cogs” and all - told her that she indeed was losing it. She knew better. A certain somebody did not. More than one somebody. That was the true problem.

“We can’t let you in anymore. Sorry.” She sighed. “You can give us your name. We could tell your family. Not… everything, but that’s the least I can do for you.”

“Morozov.” A blink of recognition in her memory. The papers made it seem as if he was “injured” in the “mishap” and sent to “vacation” shortly after the military office precariously shut down for “maintenance”.

“Sorry. This is just how it is. I know it’s cold out there, but… You were fine before, maybe you’ll make it now.” The mare pressed her head against the glass. Just as she did that, strong pain turned up in her forehead, a strong kick knocking her back.

“FUCK YOU!” the goat yelled from behind the glass, evidently having been edging her closer to the glass so he could lash out for the last time.

Raven spat on the floor, holding her head in her hooves. To think that she almost shed a tear… That said, she did, but it was out of pain. The special forces reject, expelled officially, no less, with the scarring on his head showing as much - she remembered the details of that particular paperwork case now - continued to shout from behind the glass, but she understood none of it.

“Я вас всех поубиваю, суки! Вы что, думаете, что мне холодно?! Это вам холодно, блять, а мне - нет! Я в холодной воде по яйца ходил! Хуелобы сраные! Я вас на завтрак, уроды, сожру, и добавки попрошу! Вы еще—”

A spectral, eerie howl emitted from the outside world, coupled with unpleasant, screechy clanging. Just as that happened, the engine came back to life, having revved down in the time it took to take the driver out.

“Ну вот и гости пожаловали. Ну, здрасте, бля! Я поляну крою! Куча коней, бля! Скоро, суки! Скоро! IT IS A GOOD DAY TO DIE!”

The next day, when they arrived at a good stopping point, it turned out that their own carriage was missing one of the two mechanical torches that were attached to it. Blueblood remained unconscious for three more.

Raven and Buster’s technicians tolerated each other’s company, despite volatile differences, until more or less the very end.

Day Thirty Nine: Vanguard

“Nobody step out of line. One jerk and you’re getting expunged,” said the heavily altered, filtered voice of a pony in dark grayish-green full-body armor. His massive shape backpedaled at their front, keeping a watch at them as they were walked. Five of his compatriots surrounded them at the sides, standing under the long defunct torches of the apparently not exactly abandoned fortress in the middle of the white, undead waste.

“You assholes can’t be serious,” Buster grumbled, walking in line with the rest of his ponies. “Do we need to explain to you how ridiculous this is?”

“We know. First and Fourth, check filters, creeps may be trying to spread,” the pony at the head nodded in a general direction, and each of the guards at the sides made obscure motions at their helmets and facemasks. Who First and Fourth were, none of them could tell.

Apparently, the law enforcement of the Frozen North took security precautions to levels of well-practiced paranoia.

“Come again, TACCOM,” the one in the lead said in extreme distortion, tapping the side of his helmet and causing the short antennae at the sides to light up. “VIP’s possibly VP’s. Sitrep IC.”

Even more apparently, law enforcement existed in the Frozen North, and it was pony-managed, no less. To find that there was at least some fraction of control over the ridiculously underdocumented and highly dangerous wasteland was pleasant - for a second, it felt as if problems were at a relative end. The vehicle they had obtained from the Capric abductor took a lot of getting used to, but soon enough, the tech team proved its worth and was operating it well, reliably fighting off the various kinds of no longer identifiable undead creatures populating this part of the North. Blueblood was locked up in the old vehicle, and radiation was suctioned every hour from then on, with Raven taking extreme measures to talk to him regularly to alleviate possible damage. She wore a makeshift radiation protection garment while doing it, yes, but at least there was progress in preventing him from possibly having his head explode. It was all looking up, and this seemed to be the proverbial cherry on top.

Unfortunately, that cherry ended up launching a concentrated magical blast at their transports from an obscured position, disabling the engines, and then rounded them all up while pointing threateningly master-crafted shoulder-mounted weaponry at them. All protests and inquiries were ignored, and after these ponies saw what Blueblood looked like after forty minutes without being treated, alarming crackles erupted around the vambraces and hind legs of their not-to-be-saviors. Those were not particularly good signs.

It took Raven shouting out her exact rank and the technical code of their expedition for them to even get a verbal response. Evidently, according to the armored ponies, all of them had died, and they were being rounded up as newfound wraiths to be peacefully purged.

They knew about the delegacy’s trip, including how well it went up until it was time to return. As they were very briefly told, it is their uncanny ability to survive the dangers thrown at them that made them prime candidates for being secretely undead. Evidently, no untrained convoy was ever meant to still be intact, let alone have added a vehicle, if they were to go the path they went. The outcry was severe, to say the least. Only when the Prince had accidentally coughed up a bulk of orange mist were the enforcer ponies’ weapons lowered.

“Less than five percent probability these are clean,” Raven heard the one apparently at the head say, in what appeared to be a signature, disturbingly distorted voice. “Five isn’t zero, though. All of you are being checked. Transports are under arrest. You walk the exact line. Jerk, and you go wisp.”

Without many other alternatives, being markedly outnumbered and overpowered by the North Patrol (the evident denomination, printed on the shoulders and other garment parts, and barely visible at that), they obeyed. Their path through the darkness and snow took them to a surprisingly adjacent fortress. If not for how they were being moved in, it would have looked utterly abandoned. As they were made to walk the surprisingly confusing maze of corridors, however, it was much, much more living than anything in the radius of at least fifty kilometers.

As far as Raven was concerned, the existence of this fortress was one large acidic noxious jungle spitflower spit on all that the pony species were meant to be doing. Herself, in particular.

She spent the majority of her life sorting all manners of things in Princess Celestia’s retinue. A lot of them kept secret from the populace for good reason, and a lot of them only known among the rulers of the land. She knew more about Equestria than most libraries did.

Her main thought as she looked at all the things contained inside the already suspiciously devastated fortress was as follows:

What the fuck.

The sheer level of gall that whoever - whatever - caused this obvious splinter group to appear was immense. The level of power… even bigger. Looking at all of it made her partially forget about how her royal ward was infected with ancient lich magic. By that point, it had become routine, and almost mundane.

They passed by other armored guards, adorning much the same armor as the one she identified back then as Rough Rider. The material, it became clear, was nothing her eye could instantly identify. Comic books were more accurate than real life field experience in multiple combat situations. Attached to said armor were implements that she could only about the usage of. Charge generator-looking things on the backs of bulkier ponies - heat protection? Ward spell capacitors? Energy for shoulder weaponry? Said shoulder weaponry was mindblowing as well, far beyond the mere blueprints she got to see - multi-barreled arms similar to that of the goat Morozov, only far more elegant, hose-like endings that exerted slight vapor, cannon-like barrels with apparent magazines on the sides, and many other varieties.

Glowing objects placed on the hinds and flanks, small antennae on some of the helmets, different helmet designs, some almost palpable in reality, some way beyond what any military designer would see in the most vivid nightmare. That was only the things that were obviously auxiliary, and what Raven could see in the brief glances she would get, especially in her mushy glasses. The least said of graffiti-like markings that must have been self-made by each respective bearer, and the things that said markings bore, the better it was for her own sake.

If anybody had told her that things like this had anything to do with ponykind, she would gladly have either punched whoever said that, or told herself to wake up.

And yet there they were. When they passed a larger hall, with a magically-powered bonfire - why not, at this rate? - it was practically ordinary to see a couple antlers and some tall, bendy zebra physiques. They had deer and zebras in there, too. On official grounds. In the Frozen North. Raven passed a thought that she would not be surprised to see a griffon among them, but realistically knew that that was likely to cause her to pop a blood vessel.

The fact that any vocal protest, or inability to follow the exact procession that was being drawn, could result in death, continued to be a hindrance as well. To some questionable fortune, though, they soon stopped - in front of a pair of incredibly ancient-looking stone gates. The pony in the lead touched the side of his helmet, and the antennae on the sides lit up. The gateway withdrew into the wall with an awfully electric sound.

“Get in the afflicted. Calm. Steady. Quick.”

“The afflicted?” Buster spoke up, evidently taking all this new information about what Equestria had stocked up North a touch better than Raven. He could speak without much stuttering.

“Don’t—”

“Freaking hell, you never warned us… They keep talking, it’s creeping me out,” the mare heard one of the guards on the side mumble in a surprising lack of distortion.

“He means myself. Let me pass. Don’t step out of line, I urge you,” Blueblood spoke up hoarsely and quietly, head withdrawn into shoulders, looking as if about to receive a beating. “We have to get this…” The stallion stopped to cough up a bit more unpleasant looking mist, earning a few more crackles of armor. “Get this over with.”

“Prince Blueblood, sir, we could just—” Raven whispered out in annoyance, her plan of getting to be the one to negotiate with the North Patrol falling to pieces. She was, however, quickly shushed by a stomp on the ground that sent a palpable quake through her spine. The pony at the head had his head turned right at Blueblood, and appeared to be waiting.

“The longer you take, the worse it will be for you. We’re being equine. Don’t waste your chance,” his chewed-up, low-pitched, distorted voice stung at her ears. Whether this was a threat or a sign of perverted compassion, it was hard to tell.

Nothing was, at this rate. The Prince was carefully walked into the suspenesfully dusky hall, and the door shut behind him.

“You must be confused,” a tall, bipedal, winged, darkly clothed figure said to him, standing at the far end of the massive, dusty, cold hall. “All of you are at first.”

The figure was, surprisingly, not quite correct. By that point in their journey, Prince Blueblood had been through much more than his imagination was capable of presenting to his mind in even the weirdest dream. Being nominated deceased and walked through ancient halls imbued with implements beyond the grasp of Equestrian magic or technology, and then forced into a large domic hall with growing arcane etchings on the walls and a big statue of a stone orb in the middle, to be done who knows what with, was merely part of the course.

The royal stallion had much more pressing concerns than placing this anywhere near any reasonable perception of planet Equis.

“I think I know what’s going on,” he said, immediately starting to cough, his eyes beginning to burn. The dark figure turned his way, allowing him to see, through the glowing blur of his vision, that this was a griffon. Clad in dark, leather-like clothing, with a thin, narrow cape on his back, and multiple layers of belts and gloves, and a black rubber mask on his head, he barely resembled his own species. Blueblood, however, made a guess, based primarily on how the protrusion at the end of the mask, with a large plastic filter, was a long one. Sure, there should not have been any more possibly bipedal winged species in Equestria, but the matter of “should” had long ago quit being relevant.

“You do? Go ahead,” the griffon replied, a peculiar echo audible to his voice. Even more peculiar was the lack of distortion the rest of the fortress’ staff appeared to speak with while in gear. Then again, the gear itself was quite different… The Prince’s mind wandered, and that fact alone pushed him on to laying out his assumption.

“They say we’re mislead spirits of ourselves, and in reality we are dead,” Blueblood spoke hoarsely, gulping at the end. “That’s exactly the case, isn’t it? It all matches up now. I have not felt as… unbound in all my life. All this weirdness, all this chaos, they have ceased to cause my mind to turn. This is what unlife feels like to an uninitiated, isn’t it?”

A drawn out pause saw the griffon turn to fully face the unicorn. It spread and narrowed its shoulders, and walked a bit forward, leather and metal-clad paw-pads issuing dull clanks on the stone floor. Now that he was closer, more illuminated by the dim blue light of the obscure etchings on the walls, Blueblood realized that the whole time they faced each other, he was being aimed at with a massive crossbow.

“You are very, very interesting, Prince Blueblood. Very peculiar. You’ve been in these walls for half an hour, and you’ve not thrown a single tantrum, and never demanded anything. You aren’t even crying, or threatening us,” the griffon spoke in a chilling, vague tone. “And now you give us a good reason to just do away with you and pretend you were never there at all. An Equestrian Prince. Jumping into the void with reckless abandon.” He raised the crossbow to have one of the thick glasses on his mask line up with the sights. “You do realize how terrible of an impersonator you are, don’t you?”

In a sudden crackle, dark grey lightning rose at all sides of Prince Blueblood, and he became surrounded by figures clothed much the same as the griffon, albeit of different species. Before the smoke settled, several hooves restrained him, and a pair of antlers was hovering near his throat. A sleek, curved, slim equine walked up in front of him and stuck a… thing in his mouth.

“We’re only giving you a real chance because of that. Not a single snatcher wraith has been this incompetent thus far,” the griffon continued to speak, still aiming at the borderline profanely restrained Prince. “You may yet be salvageable.”

A tense silence was over the hall for the minute that the familiar-feeling device took up Blueblood’s mouthspace. The unicorn simply went limp, not fighting the grimly adorned collective in any manner at all. He was grim himself.

There was no easy way out, not anymore. They would make him fight for himself now, he realized. No more hiding behind the guise of the magical affliction, or the alcoholic haze. No more safety in ignorance that he did not know kept him safe for years upon years of his life.

He had to be angry now.

The griffon, in the meantime, continued to aim. Blueblood’s gaze met the dull bolt strung tight in the weapon. He stared at it for some time, dedicating all his attention to it, and not the wordless figures keeping him down as if he could turn rampantly possessed at any moment.

“Just a little longer. Nobody is enjoying this.”

Regardless, the Prince stared on. The griffon was correct - in a few seconds, the device at his mouth was disconnected, with a very familiar “ch-pop”. Did Raven know of technology of such level and keep it under wraps? Was it more widespread than he assumed? How frequent were afflictions such as his? Blueblood thought and thought, more and more, until it hit him that there was no longer the vague, bodiless, ethereal feeling in his mind, or the burn in his eyes. Not at all, in fact.

It was gone, and he was still free to think and act. That just raised a whole entire new level of questions.

As far as he was concerned, he was not in control for the past two weeks. Ever since the touch of the lich left him with radiation seeping from his body and his eyes burning, his mind was not his own. Instead of retreating into safer corners, it wandered out - instead of keeping to admitted truths, it questioned. Instead of ignoring annoyances, it considered them, and instead of lamenting the death of the princely mantra - look good, be gorgeous, stay handsome - it wandered out for more. Blueblood, in his newfound, alarming thoughtfulness, instantly knew that was not him, and that he could merely bid his body goodbye. In fact, a “snatcher wraith”, whatever it was, sounded very probable.

But now it was gone, and he remained. His restrainers, however, did not - he felt himself stumble in place was they withdrew themselves, either disappearing again, or keeping to the shadows. He tried to look, but the dusk of the chamber was not very conductive. Moreover, it was not his main problem.

“What just happened?” he asked, voice creaking under nervous pressure.

“Something very interesting,” the griffon told him, still aiming right at the pony’s head. “Welcome to the world of the still living.”

“What— What was that? Why was I… Why was I like that? I wasn’t myself, and now, now it’s… What was that?!” Blueblood’s tongue tied up in itself as he tried to articulate his many questions.

“The Frozen North equivalent of the sniffles. An arcane flu. There was not much wrong with you on the physical front. On the—”

“NOT MUCH WRONG?!” the unicorn threw up his hooves, yelling in an inconsistent tone. “That… That THING, it warped my entire mind! I’m not myself anymore! I don’t think like I do! I don’t act like I do! I should be crying in a corner right now, thinking of how I will get into bed, coddling my blasted, fake medals and awards as I waste another night of my life! WHY AM I SCREAMING AT YOU RIGHT NOW?!” he glared at the griffon, walking right up to the crossbow and bumping his head against the bolt. “EXPLAIN! EXPLAIN THAT! WHY AM I DOING THIS? DID I JUST GO INSANE? IS THAT IT? THEN WHY AM I ADMITTING IT?”

The pony stared down the sights at the blank glass that obscured the griffon’s face behind the rubber mask. He rightly was furious. His tolerance had come to a stop - he wanted some certainty on what was going on. At that rate, he could take whatever twisted thing the North housed in itself, left forgotten at the top end of his country. But he wanted to know if he housed the top end of himself any longer.

“That is why you’re interesting, Prince Blueblood. You’re not insane,” the griffon spoke calmly. “You are a little shocked, but at most, it is a case of the post-traumatic stress disorder. You’re still yourself.”

“No I’m not! I spat fire at a gigantic wolf! I almost traded souls with a wraith! I mutilated my own look and image! I awakened an ancient magician! And then he infected me with something, and then I could make others do things if I looked in their eyes! Are you telling me I’m Prince Blueblood?! Are you serious?!” he continued to shout.

“Yes and no. You know the world for what it truly is now, Prince,” the party on the other side of the crossbow replied in the same calm tone. “Welcome to real life. I can see you don’t enjoy it.”

“I don’t know if I do! I don’t know anything, mister! I don’t know if… I don’t know if I!” Blueblood butchered his native language as bits of his spit landed on the bolt that could well pierce his skull at any second.

“That’s okay. It’s a rude awakening. You know what is really going on now, outside your ivory towers and heart-shaped towns. Some that turn to this place go through the same thing. We could help you accommodate…”

“How?!”

“...I said could. You see… there is a problem, Prince Blueblood. Whatever you believe, you are a Prince,” the griffon sighed audibly. “Whether you like it or not, you are a very noticeable figure. Your name has weight to it.”

“And?!”

“Well… you are not staying here, are you? You want us to take you back home, don’t you?” His head tilted slightly. It was starting to seem that the only reason he had not lost the staring contest was that his eyes were obscured, and that Blueblood was still more interested in the bolt.

“Maybe?!”

“And what will you do when you are home then, Prince?”

Blueblood bit his lower lip under the duress. At first, he thought that he had not really considered the course of events should that ever happen. Then, however, he realized that there was not much to be considered.

“I am going to end this place. I am going to take all there is in my power, and erase every last bit of this sun-forsaken wasteland. I am going to debilitate the undead, I am going to wipe away the arcane, and I am going to lock away last untold horror it holds. I don’t care what they will tell me, they think I’m a Prince, and I’ll make them follow me. They don’t know any better, but I do now. Celestia and Luna order them around, they are worshipped, and I am just that, only a suffix less! I will tell everyone of what I had seen here! They won’t have a choice but go out and end this frozen menace, even if they never thought it existed! It threatens our very selves, at every moment, and nobody even knows! We speak of harmony, and yet we have THIS in our attic?”

Again, silence prevailed over the room. The Prince panted, feeling blood pump through his head. And in that, he felt accomplished.

“That is why I am pointing this at you,” the griffon finally spoke back. “At best, Prince, you will be thrown into an insane asylum for the rest of your days. At worst, you will plunge Equestria into civil unrest for years to come.”

A sharp, painful sting hit Blueblood’s heart. He was shut down, so abruptly. By ignorance, by underestimation, all by someone who wished so hard to look threatening, only to work towards the threat toward that which was good. The unicorn’s face went from a disheartened frown into an angry grimace.

“Then…”

Shoot me here and now, the Prince wanted to say. Before he could do so, however, he finally remembered, and in how long it took him, his face flushed.

“My retinue. What about them. What are you going to do with them?” This turn of the conversation had the griffon tilt his head once again. For a fraction of a second, Blueblood saw the crossbow lower.

“Check them for afflictions and undead menace. Then ask them the same things.”

“And if they agree with me? Will you kill them?”

“They won’t agree with you.”

“But—”

“Prince Blueblood, it is you who is interesting. They are so much more typical. You like to think you are all unique. That is not always true. We know their answers before they do. None of them will ever threaten your status quo, and they will let Equestria live in its negligent peace.”

“So they will live?”

“Yes.”

“Then shoot me here and now.”

Nothing happened. Blueblood did not tense up for the shot, he did not make a particular final thought, he simply said it and was done - but nothing happened. It was as if he was not heard.

“I said shoot me here and now! Do you want me to go back home and live, knowing that I wasted a life on being a pretty picture for teenage fillies and grown mares to fawn over? Do you want me to go home and stay a piece of wordless furniture in Celestia’s court? All while I know what is happening here, on the outskirts that aren’t even on half our maps?!” he spoke through his teeth, tears of anger welling up in his eyes. “Being a mindless ghost in this blasted place is at least less disgusting.”

And still nothing happened.

“Do you want ME to pull the trigger, you BASTARD?! You DO know that ANYTHING that I’ve EVER set out to do, FAILED? If I try it, I may as well end up killing you and setting myself free! I am NOT taking the chance.”

Finally, the griffon sighed and nodded.

“Welcome to the fold, Blueblood. I can now pronounce you one of us.”

“Who— I— That is not— Who even— Just shoot me, I’m done!”

The avian’s weapon was lowered, and he set himself down in a quadrupedal state, the crossbow going on his back. Now they were at a relatively similar height.

“Most of the North Patrol is made of ambitious rejects, disciplinary mishaps, mercenaries. Nobody else would be put here as reliably. They are your sternguard against this danger that you don’t even know of,” the griffon exposed, the echo in his voice becoming more apparent now that they were more even. “Us, however, we are a subsidiary force. They call us the Paranormal Division. For ourselves, we don’t have a name. But we do share a goal.”

Blueblood continued to mutter out annoyed noises and blast spittle, becoming more and more frustrated by the second, but the griffon in black went on.

“We want to keep the rest of the world safe from this menace. Each of us had learned what this place contains through hard experience. Each of is will die before a chance to halt its influence is lost. Each of us, even when in the light, is one of the obscure.”

“Does your mask have earholes?” the Prince drew out, one of his eyes twitching. “I don’t care what this frozen abyss has spawned, whichever paranormal cause for righteousness you think you are! You are a symptom of this damned, frozen tumor! I don’t want YOU in MY Equestria, as much as I don’t want THIS!”

“And yet you are still so principled.”

“Yes, I am! I may be none of the pony that was there before, but I am still a pony! I am not going to induct myself in a disturbing, cabalistic, clearly occult clique of obsessed militants! If I do anything, then I go out, and I spread the word, and when this place is gone, it will be through what we have always stood for!” the unicorn shook in place, rampaging on. “There is no harmony in what you are. I don’t care what any of this is, this is positively not what I want laying a limb on MY Equestria’s deeds. And should you stop it from ever knowing it under the guise of protecting it? Then damn you, and let me be dead.”

“Then you are who I need.”

Blueblood only gasped as a sudden white flash blanked his vision, and harsh wind blew through his mane, freezing his face. A cornucopia of noise assaulted his ears, and when he could see, he was in the same chamber, only with a large hole in its side, it being the source of wind.

Green flame spread all throughout, and a silhouette befell each of the darkly clothed figures inside. They moved frantically, albeit with elegance. As his vision adjusted, he saw that they were in combat. Loud hoofsteps and noises of distortion came from behind him, and many of the North Patrol that he had seen as he was being walked in joined the fray, desperately trying to set up their various weaponry to fight off the foe.

As the green tint thickened against each line of each shape of what Blueblood was being shown - with clear intent, he realized - the futility of the Paranormal Division and North Patrol’s actions became clear. The Prince’s gut cringed as he saw the figures that appeared to hold him down just a short while ago get torn to shreds, gratuitous bloodshed abound. His main reaction to the spectacle, however, was anger.

He looked at that which opposed them, in dusty silhouettes, seemingly created from memory at best by that which showed him all this and, in fact, orchestrated the entire ordeal. In what he saw, he recognized untold horror. Fleshy… things with haphazard limbs, bodies full of nothing but gaping maws and teeth. Long tongues dragging behind the obtuse bodies, leaving trails in the snow. Even bigger, differently warped beings posing behind them. All of them, worse than anything he could not imagine.

“Why did you bring them— Agh!” he heard one of the North Patrol speak familiar enough words.

“Come again, TACCOM! Situation D2, cut us of—” one that lead them down the halls not so long ago said his last words before a ball of mouths came onto him.

“You never told us, you creepy feathered fuck!” another was about to turn at the large crossbow-wearing griffon, but was halted as that very griffon had a poignant tongue pierce his chest.

It existed. As he lived and was technically one of Equestria’s rules, this existed right in their proverbial attic, and it slaughtered the ones that were seemingly made for this restless region.

“Who are you and what do you want. Where are the rest of mine,” Blueblood spoke plainly, staring at the horrid imagery, shown to him in wispy, green glows of the past.

“We’re acquainted, and I want to see where your journey takes you. They’re undergoing much the same, simply less interesting.” It had the griffon’s voice, but the echo prevailed now. In that echo, Blueblood heard many, many voices. Some of them he recognized. As his mind took note of a certain voice, it would become more prominent in the choir. He did not question the possible horror of whatever he spoke to, for the time being.

Finally removing the site of the terrible battle from Blueblood’s point of view, he stood now in a pristinely white space, and to his sides were the dozen ponies he traveled with. Before he could even call out to them, the one at his side halted him. As it had coursed through many a voice over the short sentences it gave him, it finally centered on one.

“No point in reaching them. They aren’t really here, and their conversations are… private. Ours is more interesting, regardless,” the haughty pearl-white unicorn mare with a mane that had Blueblood’s stylist faint in ecstasy at least thrice spoke to him. Her shape was transparent, and her facial expression virtually nonexistent. “You should see now that I have come to know you rather well.”

Blueblood turned to “Rarity” with a slight frown.

“Why… her?”

“I’d rather provoke. You act best when you are provoked. I’ve learned as much. I know each of yours’ personalities of interest. Some’d rather be comforted, some’d rather be stimulated. You I apparently need to be angry.”

“I… Just… So be it.”

“Good.”

“I… I have seen all too much, and learned all too much. I doubt there’s much of a way of toppling it. Just tell me what you are and what your agenda is. I am sick of being… ugh… played with.”

“I shall go at my own speed. Your “case of the sniffles” was only half that. My servant-I-never-asked-for did one thing right in his hilariously overly ambitious life. He lead me to you.”

Blueblood chewed on his lip, before a glare of recognition fired up in his eyes. In a slight mockery of his insight, the picture of the shriveled up skeletal Arab became visible in the thin air.

“The… um… the lich? Was he— Oh, dear, I remember now. I saw you and ran to punch you in the face. You read my mind right away?”

“I thought I did. I was wrong. You are full of surprises. Unlike many, many others. A small, small segment of my consciousness was transferred into you as you ran, so valiantly, to punch a mare that angered you in the snout. In that, you finally deprived the world of the menace that was Al-Walid. Had you not done that, his personality would probably have fully taken over your mind. Now you will just have to live with a shriller voice.”

“That… I… Let us just move on,” the stallion sat on his haunches, thin air feeling like exactly that. The most feasible explanation of how this was being done was that it was merely his mind coming up with a way to interpret that being’s presence and actions. A precariously comforting thought.

“You’re very hard on yourself. Even more so since you were forced to start thinking. You look for purpose, for motivation, for a drive to be that which you so aspire to be, but are not. That is typical enough. But… I see something in you that I had not seen in millennia, at least not as far as I looked. Granted, I did not much try, but still… For how corrupted and slothful your existence may have been up to this point, you are one of your own through and through. You have no idea, Prince Blueblood, how rare that is becoming as years crawl on.”

The “mare” sat down next to him, forcing the Prince to shuffle away.

“You haven’t told me who you are. I want to know just what in the name of the wide blue skies I am meant to try and find a way to get rid of when I’m being through with this place,” he said with poised indignance.

“Rarity” chuckled in response, ending with a sigh.

“Let me put it this way. I have spent an eternity chasing my own tail,” the being said, and pointed its “hoof” forward. There, Blueblood saw an image of a massive, moustached, many-eyed serpent, rotating in place, its tail in its mouth. “And learned a thing or two about purpose of life and its futility in so doing.”

“Another ancient evil,” the stallion hung his head. “This planet baffles me when I think about it. Maybe that is why so many don’t.”

“Think what you will. I have learned to keep my influence open to interpretation. It never goes the way you want it to when you force it directly.”

“Really? How many things have you forced? What other hapless royalty did you subject to mind-readings and force them to undergo personality tests?”

“None you would find in your history books. I learned with time. I learned a very important thing.”

The “mare” sighed, and a kaleidoscope of pictures from cities and nations that Blueblood had, indeed, never heard or seen or had any reason to believe existed, flurried by them.

“When you are big, you want to decide that which the small do. You think yourself an artist of entire generations. That is, until you realize that a blink of an eye too long, and you had slept through all that there ever was. A life is very meaningless.”

The stallion hung his head. His mind still raced with the sheer amount of information - from how he was still himself, to how the traumatic experience caused him to be able to act in an informed manner, to how there was paramilitary operating in the North, to how there were outwordly things ripped said paramilitary apart… and this. Therefore, this speech merely made him a bit sad.

“And, Prince Blueblood… that is a very, very good thing.” “Rarity” turned to him, and he just barely got himself to look at “her”. “When you take the weight of something truly massive onto your shoulders, you wish to be insignificant. But by then, you can never ever be. What you do with what you have seen here will never matter. Your Equestria will never matter. It will all vapor away, and I will forever chase my tail, and this orb will forever spin, until it all begins anew.”

Blueblood simply listened, barely trying to make sense of the many pictures that flashed before them, as the being narrated its long-winded advice.

“So be happy that it all matters to you. Be happy to be angry, Prince Blueblood, be happy to be mad, sad, upset. Cherish those emotions, seek to be challenged. Do not fall into apathy. I see seeds of so much… curiousness, locked in you. That what you have seen, the things none of your predecessors cared to clean up, they opened it up. Don’t let it go to waste. Go out. Be wild. Make something of yourself. Maintain your pony status quo - but be truly remembered.”

He blinked and saw the many ponies and other species of the North Patrol and Paranormal Division be shown to him.

“I see many things when I awake - or, am forcibly awakened by individuals I regret coming in contact with. You and them are the ones I took in first. I foretell that the future you will wring is going to be much more… flavored, than the one they will. You saw how little effort it took to fully reconstruct their behavior - I am more than certain that I was fully accurate on their treatment of you. You… I want to see shades of what you have done when I next open my eyes. You have already affected more lives than you think you have, but I want more, I want brighter. And I definitely don’t want… these.” To elaborate on “these”, an image of one of the malformed creatures stayed still before them for a few seconds before fading away.

The Prince listened, and raised a hoof, but then lowered it. To answer his mute question, the being showed three pictures - six mares, what must have been a remarkably massive castle, and three dots. At their bottoms, they were oddly mirrored, but before he could land his eye on a definite difference, it had vapored away, much like his interest.

“So… this is all for your own amusement? That is what it is? You are a lazy spirit of Discord, that is all you are?”

“I am much older.”

“Be it as it may. I’ve heard your advice. I fail to see how anything can impress me at this rate. This conversation may as well be over. I don’t know how, but you will not be spinning forever.”

“I wish. But keep that bravado alive. It makes you so much more worthwhile.”

“I have had enough of being talked down to by cosmic beings of questionable allegiance,” Blueblood frowned, getting up on his fours. “Today has been all too frustrating. I know what I’m doing from here on out, and I am done being messed with. This is final. I insist on being let out of here, and be allowed to… try to perform my due adequately. Now!”

“You really are special. In a multitude of ways.”

“Oh! That does remind me,” Blueblood’s voice straightened up, and him and the form that the being had taken stood face to face. He did not, however, have any words, but instead, unleashed a harsh slap on its face. His hoof flew right through “Rarity”’s face, but the point was made on both fronts.

“Two last things. First I reiterate - remember that, however minor, your existence alone causes peculiar consequences. Build on them, and live with them for all the blissfully short live you have. And second… A favor to ask of you.”

“I do not—”

“Apologize when you’re awake.”

Blueblood was found by his highly distraught retinue after they had apparently broken into the chamber he was taken into. He had been panickedly informed that the denizens of the keep had vanished in their entirety, whereas they themselves had all apparently been out of consciousness for at least two hours. In an unpleasant turn of events, the first palpable movement the Prince had done was slap Raven across the face, breaking her glasses, only after which was he woken up.

His attempts to find out if they had encountered any unnatural conversation lead to the group assuming that a mental affluence anomaly had taken over the keep, and that they were to head for Pierce Heaven as fast as possible. Gladly, their vehicles were still in place, two snow mounds in the barren land. As to the nonexistence of the Prince’s sickness, nobody seemed to have noticed, and he himself did not see the unpleasant device on Raven’s back as they retreated.

It continued to miff Blueblood that for all his attempts to prove himself, there was barely any true consequence of his actions. When he, at long last, was laid to sleep normally, and suffered a night of the most disjointed dreams he had had in years, he decidedly wished for more concrete actions. That, he knew, he would enact, and live through the results of - one way, or another.

The continuity of their own action in the Frozen North did not come to his mind, as he was overly occupied planning for the presumably nearest future.

Day Forty Two, P.1: Raven

Raven stood leaning against the wall, looking into the darkness shaping outside the window of the VIP cabin. A tray with recycled tea and emergency smallcakes balanced in the air next to her, creating a titter more frequent than the consistent chug and crunch of the treads and the magic engine. Her face was limp, eyes looking at nothing in particular in the passing deadlands, teeth vacantly chewing cut up, still cold lips. A loud humming noise emerged from the section near the waypoint engine, and she took in a breath, levitating a small pair of glasses that lay on the main cabin table to her snout.

“Refreshments are ready as I thought you’d request, sir,” the unicorn said with a slight monotone to her speech, fixing up her collar. “Any prob—”

“Now, if I may, which I may, a refreshment would be less patronization, Raven,” replied the unevenly voiced, bemusingly rough-sounding, now only somewhat large unicorn, who emerged from the room. “And I didn’t, in fact, request anything.”

“I thought you would.”

“Which I didn’t, come figure that. Weren’t you the one to adore ending arguments with how we are all adults in here? Don’t you suppose I can, perhaps for just a little passing chance, handle myself, thank you very much? Not to start another, but this really is starting to become irritating,” the stallion spoke upliftedly, occasionally turning away from her and as if to someone else, as if a speech was being said, and even leveling his voice in accordance. She stared through him and out the window he was blocking, focusing on the vague shapes outside. Curiously, his head seemed to follow the same directions, occasionally making subtle turns as if to look at the sides. Two breaths would leave her nostrils and one breath would enter the mouth. The tray stayed where it was.

“We have already had a… talk that regarded that, sir,” the secretary said, putting the tray down on the table, near the unfinished game of chess they had been playing.

“Now, how did that turn out?” he pointed a hoof to her, staring right into her eyes, perhaps even drilling, if any of Prince Blueblood’s features could be given such an aggressive description.

“The… ffrrghhmmm… crew at the lead ran over the husk of some bovine creature and then we spent four hours disassembling it so it would stop wailing. And, as you may recall,” the mare rubbed her forehead. “It continues to scream every time we try to sleep.”

The bigger unicorn stomped his hoof on the sofa in a display of anger and, or, determination. Nervously, he looked left and right again, and shook his head.

“Then to finish it now! Raven, I see you are trying your best to keep this operation going, as it is a righteous cause that we have—”

The mare stared into the dark faraways beyond the window, breathing in the same manner. She would tense up and relax parts of her body to keep her mind occupied, and she would dart back and forth with her eyes to fuel the illusion of legitimacy. Once the volume had risen, a deep sigh left her, after which through her mind only other chants passed. In this limp limbo, standing in front of the factually to still be called Prince, her tongue and jaws moved slightly on their own accord, repeating to herself a mantra of sanity.

“The task. Only the task. The task. Only the task. She knows. She always knows. The task, only the task. She knows, she always knows” - it went something like this, Raven knew. She did not know, herself. Rarely was she in perceptive spirits when there was need for it.

Recently, the need was frequent. As Blueblood paced around the room, vocalizing, mimicking, and articulating, that need was all the more poignant. It became disastrous when the mismatched, odd, blabbering hunk of barely kempt, partly burned, somewhat scarred horsemeat walked right up to her and pushed an accusing hoof right against her snout. All too straight and all too primed.

“—RAVEN. RA. VEN. Raven, you overbearing… craven, you have ceased even pretending, haven’t you?”

He caught on. The problem had never been as clear as it was then, when Raven closed her eyes, fixed her glasses, and took in breath to make a response.

Her task was in jeopardy. There were several requirements, and through all the insanity that had been encountered, she kept it intact through nothing but luck and personal ingenuity. No hubris in admitting that. She was not Celestia’s own secretary for nothing. She considered everything. Even when thrown without warning, without truthful information, without even a clear definition of her purpose, to what emerged as a region the threat of which few things she had ever seen could match… she sustained it. But not even someone like her, not even with days of practice, warming up, conversationalism - plenty of time and practice to execute her psychology skills - could have predicted this.

Blueblood had changed. Blueblood was no longer who she was packed with, and no longer who voidly accepted that they were given escort of a number of ponies never before mentioned, to operate their vehicle never before registered. Blueblood stood in front of her, spoke understandable sentences, articulated, and was about to punch her in the snout. Even though his eyes went left and right, as if tracking some noise.

“I… I apologize. I haven’t been myself lately.” Raven nodded to him, and to her own words. “With the amount of time I had been dedicating to keeping you in good spirits, I forgo my own concerns sometimes,” she fully admitted the small fraction of truth. “You will forgive me if, after all that’s been… endured… I get caught up in my own thoughts.”

“Caught up in your own thoughts, is that right… Is…” the Prince sighed, and averted his threateningly, dangerously clear pair of eyes. “I… No, no, no, I will apologize.”

The secretary subtly sighed in relief, taking a self-congratulatory bite out of one of the smallcakes near the tea. The latter had gotten colder - quite a lot of time had to have passed for a hot liquid to cool down in a heatcage cup. Blueblood had things to say, it seemed, and despite having spoken for so long, had not reverted to a babbling mess that too much mental activity would normally leave him.

“It is now my duty to lead us through to the end. If I am to even pretend that what they call me is what I really am, your lot I must be able to manage. And yet I forget. That you work too hard, that Buster had not seen the interior of our vehicle for days now, that—”

Raven nodded and nodded, taking a seat on the circular sofa, which was now mercifully clean of the events at the start of the journey. The fabric got much tougher after the repairs, but it was no complaining matter. Granted, some parts of the repair process definitely were. She sighed at realizing that there would scarcely be a better time to bring that up than this particular talk. Still, she allowed the Prince to go through the list of all the engineering crew, one by one. That only rooted her worry. Everyone now had a name, and a problem of their own.

“I will be fine, believe me. This is all almost over, after all. Soon enough, there will be… no haunts, no possessed creatures, no possessed plants, no ruins rising out of nowhere, no hallucinations… Soon enough, all will be fine. You needn’t put in this much effort neither.”

“No, I need to. The work has only begun. Damned will I be if I let myself crawl back into the shell and… sit there. When we get to the border, and once the paperwork had been filled - and, I swear, I will oversee every last bit of it, too much there is that I had slacked on - then the real—” he nearly tripped on a bourbon bottle that had rolled from under their luxurious bunks, looking at it with hatred enough to make even Raven squirm. “The real work begins.”

With another deep breath, the secretary interjected.

“Then, since we’re so close…” Compulsively, she looked out the window, almost hoping to see the disfigured mountain peak of the city they were heading to, but saw nothing but the pitch blackness of three past noon and the curvy, grabby limbs and digits of the ruin and waste-interspersed forest. “You should know. Our engineering crew, who you spoke of in, uh, admirable detail. Prince Blueblood, we cannot trust them.” The mare took in an even deeper breath before he could say a thing. “There is something that needs to be done.”

The remark got him to stop and shudder in place. After a few seconds of silence, he lifted a hoof and rotated to face her.

“Now, you come again. What?” Blueblood looked right at her, his face bereft of much in the way of childish misunderstanding. It was regular somewhat adult misunderstanding now, coupled with frustration and the remaining symptoms of bodily and mental damage he had sustained. His mouth kept tense, uneven, and his eyes darted every now and again, their lower lids tittering slightly.

“So the stupid goat is taking it seriously now, good... “ Raven all but said out loud, but settled on: “Our engineering crew, all of them, they can’t be trusted, especially not by you. Not anymore.”

“B— Ho— No, no, that is nonsense. Why now, how come, and if this is merely a continuation of this silly childish feud you have been having with every single one of them for the past skies know how long…” The mare halted a breath, not having until then realized that the rather animosity between her and the rest was animated enough for him to notice. “Then we are having problems, Raven.”

“It’s… Prince Blueblood, for having turned into a thinker now,” she began to respond, struggling to contain venom. “You seem to have noticed that a group of alarmingly nondescript individuals have been on board with us, and have, so far, in this cursed environment, not been harmed, massively injured, or killed. And through all that, they pilot our vehicles, even though you might remember that this—” She could not help knocking a hoof against the floor to make her point. “—is not mass-produced, and, as such, the only ponies capable of operating it… Well, they do have to be on a level higher than a regular exploration engineering team, don’t you think?”

He did think, in fact, and for way less than she expected. Having considered that the time to keep explaining was bought, she opened her mouth, only to be sharply cut off.

“Oh, blast it all, why, of course, we have a whole contingent of specially trained assassins with us, and they have been dormant all this time to strike right when we are about to leave these… cesspits of freezing doom. Absolutely! Makes perfect sense!” the Prince proclaimed, and then stepped, quickly, right in front of her. “To an imbecile.”

He lowered his head to stare right into her eyes, covered by the new glasses. She noticed he still could not help passing a glance over the old pair, contained in her chest pocket. Awareness and memory. They seemed to work almost all the time for him, it seemed.

“And perhaps you had not noticed behind all the tea, cakes, other foods, and pleasant speeches that you had been making all this time, but I have forcibly evolved from that level. I am at least a fool now, thank you very much. I see through you, for how much you’d like to think otherwise.” He stared right into her eyes, and she stared back. A cold ran down her spine as his eyes were all too sane, sober, and clear. “Your interbureau affairs, or whatever nonsense it is, do not concern us when we are permanently five minutes from freezing doom. You will work with them, Raven, and you will enjoy it even, because unless you do, then we will all die, now won’t we?”

The mare’s mouth ran dry, but she responded.

“They aren’t assassins, but they will see you dead sooner rather than later. You’re mature enough to understand the concept. Apparently.”

“And how so? What’s a band of better-trained-than-normal engineers-with-survival-skills got against me? Someone put in the effort to send them here with us, and we would have been dead if not for them. This does not add up.”

“Our… directions, they are different. Listen to me, Prince Blueblood, just… listen.” She raised her hooves in mock defense, wishing that the ground given to him would invite the stallion to a position of weakness. That was the level of tactics that Blueblood required now. That bad.

“I have been for weeks now, and odd it is that I can scarcely remember all that much of them. Conspicuously, a lot of what I do remember is you talking to me. And then some horrors. Don’t think you’ll lull me into another hypnotizing speech, I know you have been doing that to pacify me, so that I wouldn’t go out and ruin something else. I hope that is clear. Have had quite enough trauma prevention speech therapy when I was a foal, thank you very much.”

The mare took a few seconds to blink again, having been, in fact, taken quite aback by the statement. With effort, she continued.

“In… short words, sir. When we were all sent here, there was never a notion of success with the talks to these… Northfolk ponies. It was all demonstrative. Both me and the “technicians” primarily had orders for the trip back, including if all went wrong, which, as you know, it did.” Raven chose words carefully, her chest pounding, and sweat finding its way on the glasses. “My orders are… to avoid disaster. To avoid harm from coming to Equestria.”

“Noble, right, very noble. So, to you we have been walking a knife’s edge all this time. Precarious,” the Prince mused to himself for a side note, allowing the mare to ease up a little, seeing how his remark was less barking and negative than expected.

“But theirs? I have looked into it, I’ve asked, and I’ve been directly told. They… have to bring back Prince Blueblood. And trust me, it does not seem like they intend to act on anyone else’s orders.”

“...and… that is bad… how?.. I mean, surely it’s odd that I’m singled out as much as I am, but I suppose my name has some value back there, to the… factual rulers, I suppose,” he mused again, and looked out the window, worriedly. She saw his eyelids flicker quickly.

“Sir… Honest question.” Raven played her card. “Are you quite sure that you are Prince Blueblood anymore?”

The staggered silence that answered her was the relief she needed, and the mare slumped down a little. Blueblood or no Blueblood, he was grown to have an ego. At last, an opportunity to play to it presented itself, if even in a perverted way like this.

“Well… I… am? I should be. And besides, what does it matter - all the agencies and bureaus under Equestria operate in the realm of paperwork, and as far as paperwork is concerned, I qualify. You’re not telling me that I’m some sort of bodysnatching ghost and you’ve been keeping me around just to make the reveal all the more shocking, are you now?” the Prince displayed a troubling knowledge of modern popular entertainment, or else simply made an unintentional reference. Still, by that point, Raven was wary of any display of uncharacteristic actions.

“You… would be surprised. Sir, listen to yourself. You’re talking of reform here, reform there, reform everywhere, you’re even taking command of our vehicles bit by bit. Are you entirely sure there’s going to be a place for that when you return?”

“Well, I don’t intend to ask!”

“...which is why with each passing day, you’re making yourself a problem.”

Blueblood stopped again, and had his eyes dart around some more. He took in a breath, but said nothing. She allowed for it to sink in, almost reveling in her victory. The rest of the plan was simple, if ghastly, but it just needed to be done.

“This… is… ugly.”

“We can’t be choosers, I’m afraid.”

“No, but… Look at all this,” the stallion motioned around the cabin, but most prominently to the windows which showed pitch blackness. “I… understood it when we wouldn’t get along, work in harmony, when there was just… dark, freezing death everywhere. None of us are impenetrable, we all fold down. I… I still wish I knew just how to bring everyone together, so that you stop… Being like this.”

She took a cup of tea and sipped on it, allowing him to continue. She had won, after all, so there may as well have been good cause for it.

“Because as you are right now… They won’t talk to you, they won’t speak with me, I don’t know what anyone is doing, you can’t stand them, and then you talk down to me. This is disorder. Chaos. Right now… you fit this place just fine, Raven,” he whispered in an astoundingly serious tone. “And you should remember. I want all of this purged. Gone. DESTROYED,” he shouted all of a sudden, banging his hoof against a chest where they kept the surviving bourbon bottles, and causing her to almost choke on her tea. “But what point is there if, even physically pure, you bring a part of it back with us? No point! Now, furthermore!”

To alleviate danger, Raven finished the tea.

“Now, what you tell me… I never really thought about it, but what if… What if Equestria doesn’t understand it either? The harmony? The… friendship, that they preach about, our Princesses?” The secretary’s eyebrows perked at the noxiousness of that word in his speech. “What you tell me is just ludicrous, there should be no need for it, how… UGLY is all of this? Can it… Oh, no, no, no, it can’t be that. No, we can’t have disorder of such magnitude there where it counts most - at our head! If, if this is true, then… then what do I…”

Raven did not finish the cake. Danger was very much, very, very much, not alleviated. It was magnified. She was far from victory.

“I… I would have understood if it was only now…” he started to mumble, while she began to rise, taking a subtle sigh, and trying to clear her mind of the thoughts of complications. “I mean, even now there’s something staring right at us, probably up on the roof—”

“What.” Raven said flatly, having barely come close to the shaken up Prince, let alone reached for her pocket.

“What? You don’t see it? We’ve had eyes piercing us this entire day, I’ve told you about it, but you just nodded, you—”

Her body froze up, and she squinted. Blueblood was disturbingly hard to read. It was his face. It was always a little worried, a little concerned, a little unsure, a little dumb. And just the fact that she was seriously considering him having read her moves this far ahead and acting to buy himself time... was troubling in and of itself.

“Are you messing with me?” she asked directly, taking a step in his direction. He did not move, himself, merely throwing his head back and forth, looking out the windows.

“I— Oh, this is ridiculous, are you telling me that YOU didn’t even hear them bloody well whisper by the ceiling? You’re the one who has the top bunk!”

“I…” Raven’s irises shrunk. She had not slept much that day, haunted bovine cries making it more of a problem for her acute mind. On hearing odd sounds within the cabin and not having anything outright disastrous happen immediately, she discarded the oddities as sleep deprivation. A lot of experience with it lead her to believe that yes, faint whispers after a week of three hours of sleep a night at most, under constant duress, did make you vulnerable. Only Blueblood slept quite well, and seemed to also be… receptive, as of late.

“Perfect! Amazing! Now we’re discussing political aggression and fundamental changes while there’s something right above us, and I was under the impression you thought it was under control! Raven… Raven, how is this… You… But you always… You always knew…”

It was when she looked at him and felt a pang of sorrow witnessing him revert to a state of childish hurt that the secretary realized - something had indeed gone terribly wrong. Not wishing to waste much more time, she had to take care of problems one by one. First in line would be something that could potentially end them all, which was less than optimal. Sure, it had taken its time, but there was no rhyme or reason to the Frozen North - assuming one counted out the prevailing coldness and deadness of it all. To be quick, she reached for a subtle lever at the top to pretend to open it up, but that effort was prevented by a more significant show of desperation and loss of control.

With a screeching halt and a loud bump of their leading vehicle against something very dense and thick, Blueblood was thrown on the floor, and Raven had to struggle to remain in place. The heavy, armored, mostly illegitimate military vehicle that they had in the lead (and which the waypoint engine was aiming for) had crashed into something it could not simply break through. That was bad.

“This is bad,” Raven confirmed to herself.

And then the top was opened by itself - it was torn, in fact, right off - just as the engine depowered itself, its automation deciding that now that they had halted, power field protection was unnecessary. The tough metal came off just as easily as it did many days ago, when local wildlife tore it open like a stairway jungle tiger a can of tin. Only, perhaps, easier.

Even before looking at what lay beyond the freshly torn hole, in the freezing blackness, Raven rushed to punch the alarm button that had been installed some days back, signaling the head vehicle that things were going rotten. Upon having heard Blueblood say a whispering “Oh you can’t be serious…” and turned her head, she actually punched the sturdy construct of plastic, rubber, and metal right into the wall.

Descending into the VIP cabin were three equine figures, and first came a singed, frostbitten, cut up, missing half a shirt, and glowing a ghastly weak green out the eyes and mouth, male goat. His mouth moved faintly, but produced no sound, and his limbs stuttered - he was as a puppet. Even with that, and the damage his body had sustained, it did not take Raven long to recognize the Capric deserter they had… acquired the lead vehicle from.

“Fucking hell,” the mare spat to herself, feeling her clothes up and scanning the environment, finding no objects remotely heavy or sharp enough to penetrate his hide. It was hard before, and now, looking at the two figures behind him…

“You know about us. Then no hiding,” said the somehow larger mare of the two, a towering hunk of thickly clothed muscle. Her bright blue mane hung tied into a long braid, which ended in a clob of hair that, even by look alone, could easily function as a morningstar. A long, sectioned, remarkably artificed spear sat attached to her back. “Time is up.”

As if the telltale towering physique and barely pony appearance did not say enough, the melodic, sibilant accent confirmed that these were locals. That had not been good news for twenty-eight days by then. Raven rearranged herself as quickly as she could, especially on seeing the other of the two. Fighting was incredibly suboptimal.

“What…” Blueblood spoke first, and that fact alone, on old reflexes, spiralled Raven’s panic into a new highlight. “What is the problem? What do you need from us?”

The secretary was barely relieved upon realizing that he had not yet made everything worse. Mainly because she was busy comprehending what the other mare was doing - it took a little belief at first, and then a lot of effort to suppress old thoughts of places much farther south than here, albeit perhaps only in the literal sense. The other mare, only slightly smaller, wore a similar coat, and her mane was a looser, shorter snow white, but it was not her appearance, or the weapon - a foreleg-mounted crossbow - that troubled Raven. It was that, from an outstretched hoof, a thick beam of green poured, and straight into the goat’s body. With this, the mare and the goat shared the glow of the eyes, only hers shone much brighter.

No horn on her head.

“We do what we should… Have done long ago,” the blue-maned mare fumbled with words, looking at the two tiny ponies in front of her. “We will be even now. Let us all rest easy.”

The mare made a mere few movements, and the spear was already hanging at her foreleg, attached by a barely visible cloth strap. Raven’s instincts tensed her up and began to calculate which direction to lunge in and what to do next, but somehow, again, Blueblood acted first.

“Halt! Let us know, at least! We’ve done something to you, I can tell, so let us at least know!” he spoke with mild hysteria, staring at the trio. There was no need for him to look back for Raven to understand - he was buying time. Worth little all in all, but it could not be underestimated in their current position. This was worse than wolves. More than that, it seemed to work.

The blue-braided mare hung her head and sighed. Raven made a few steps upon having seen that, but as soon as she almost got close, she opened her eyes and quickly stared at her. The secretary’s hooves planted themselves on the floor by themselves.

“I am Vårenträd. This,” she lightly pointed with the side of her leg to the other mare, who had remained static, as did the goat, all while looking straight at them of course. “is Viskavind. You had our husbands killed. Vildefløy and Vänsterfält were their names, but you never asked. You left our walls, and then we tracked. There is no rest without balance, without balance there is…” Vårenträd closed her eyes for a second, and nodded at the torn up goat. Now that he had been standing in the light for some time, she saw massive gashes on his side, and burns on the fur. Their torch was gone, it seemed. Even then… it was not theirs, no.

“Oh you fucking spitling piece of crap…” Raven muttered to herself, having stumbled herself onto the answer to what exactly the mare talked about. Twenty-eight days ago.

“We… did?.. We… oh… oh, we…” Blueblood, who had remained on the floor, albeit positioned in a more dignified manner now. “Oh bleeding hell, we did.”

“You don’t argue. Good. This is hard. If I can’t… explain… just know. It is past us. Let me find words. Vilde was better at your language than me,” the braided mare scrunched her large mouth. A special glance of the bright blue eyes was passed to the secretary. This effectively left only the “engineers” to come and rescue them, and somehow Raven was doubtful they were going to, if they were even alive.

“That’s… okay. I didn’t understand much when I first got here either,” the Prince told her in an oddly calm manner.

“You still don’t,” replied Viskavind and Morozov, their voices reverberating. The goat’s shifting, high-pitched voice was even shriller now, and the other mare’s almost masculine.

“Maybe.”

The secretary shut her eyes tight, throwing her head back and forth. The ridiculousness of the situation was starting to get to her. She had seen things others had not seen. She saw what Equestria needed the South for, and left a changed mare, a very changed mare. Regular mares were not accepted to be Princess Celestia’s personal secretaries. That was what she was to call herself, that is. Her duties even occasionally overlapped with those of a secretary’s, and all of them she had performed to the fullest. No questions, no hitches, no issues. She had a task, and Princess Celestia knew everything else. Go in, adapt, do as you do, and emerge successful. She was useful to her, she has always been, as she never would have been to anyone else, not after the jungle and the temple. No, no. Raven was special. Raven knew how bad things got. Perhaps… Raven was too proud.

So this was what it was for, perhaps. An impossible task in a land that even someone like her failed to comprehend. No win condition. Only varying degrees of loss, to show that nobody was impenetrable, and as insulting as possible. When even an inbred illegitimate imbecile sees through you and when what is dead and what is alive want the same thing. You with a still heart. Only what for? She had been useful. She would have remained so.

“There… has to be balance. You kill our lives. We kill yours. You ruin our homes. We end yours. You… leave our… fires… uncared for. We leave yours. A family without a husband to watch over the house when we are out is... nothing. But to leave a… spirit… is bad even for a nothing. It… has to be even.”

Neither Raven nor Blueblood had anything to say to what the mare had managed to put together. Not that it was incomprehensible, it was serviceable. There was just nothing for an option better than to let her keep talking - and even then, her and her partner looked worried, anxious.

“You left with nothing to live for. So are we. We looked for you. Tracked you down. You have a quiet trail. We thought it was good for you. But… we… half… wasted our time.” As both of the small ponies comprehended the part where their adventures had a “quiet trail”, a sad, bemused smirk spread over Vårenträd’s wide mouth. “Your lives are already empty. Done without us. We know, when you return, you will be like us. Nothing. But less… aahhh… dig… nity.”

“You…” Blueblood had opened his mouth, causing Raven to jolt through the same old instincts. “...may be right. We’re hopeless, all of us. And maybe even all of our kind. I just want a chance at changing them when I’m back. If I’m back. I don’t know if that matters to you. Suppose not.” Through all of that, he kept a clear calm tone, even if it took him visible effort. A thought in the back of the secretary’s mind told her that perhaps he had picked something up with all the politics going on in his old everyday life after all.

A sad chuckle emerged from Vårenträd.

“I wasn’t finished yet. You can have plans or no plans. None of us do anymore. We are equal. A nothing that is lost can’t be left to wander. We are not cruel.”

“You… are going to mercy kill us?..” The unicorn mare tilted her head, legitimately asking the question.

“Uh… yes.”

“Can we… take our chances with the wild, maybe? Don’t worry about the hole, our, uhhhmmm, friends in the other car can fix that.”

“No they won’t,” the big mare responded with a sigh. “Nobody will do anything anymore. Time is up, yours, ours too.”

“What do you mean?” Blueblood raised a hoof, as if in genuine concern - but for them, not for himself. Diplomacy 101 seemed to have rubbed off on him, even though he barely ever looked past the cover, it seemed. Raven nodded to herself, using the time to gather a better response.

“I don’t know how to say it in yours. You don’t know ours. Someone bad is coming. She was coming for you for a long time,” Vårenträd said, looking straight down at Blueblood. “She wants you for something. Something evil is happening. Nothing good will happen from this. We almost lost you. Only found him,” she nodded at the goat. “In time to… pre… serve… memory. Viska kept him to lead to you. She… She… is worse than a lost nothing. Please understand. We are all equals.”

Raven was awaiting Blueblood’s response, but instead only saw the Prince lower his head in… something that her gesture reading skills told her was understanding. That was distressingly odd, because she had no idea what was meant under “she” and how that could convince someone like him to so easily die. At least in front of her, Blueblood had not yet shown outright suicidal tendencies, his period with the blatantly mock-”smuggled” bourbon notwithstanding.

“You will forgive us if we don’t want to die just because you think someone bad is coming. That isn’t very reasonable, we’ll want a little proof, and we’ll want you to remove whatever you detoured the road with. This can still end peacefully,” the mare said. And in return, the bigger mare only grinned, showing off large, and sometimes sharp, teeth.

“That wasn’t us. I said we had no time. I was serious. Sorry. Wasted enough. Go wherever you southlanders go after you die. We won’t meet,” Vårenträd said, and began to aim the spear again, looking at Blueblood, who tapped his hoof on the floor, barely anxious, more nervous. Raven’s mind raced - she had to do something. Failure could not come just so easily. She scanned through so many thoughts, staring at the damned three, and thought. It was less than a second, but a long one, until she put it together. Based only on similarity and gut feeling, and on the little bit of face she saw of the Northfolk stallion whom she stabbed through the eye with that screwdriver all those days ago.

“You know, I killed your husband, you bluehead bitch,” the unicorn mare yelled as suddenly as she could, hoping the huntress in front of her could be halted by that. Fortunately, she could, and the two met with glances of faked mockery and mild disgust.

“You are stupid.”

“I killed both of them! Both the kills - right on me. You big ugly… THINGS, you aren’t as good as you think. You’re degenerates and mutants. I spit on your tradition and on your North, alright?” she kept yelling, looking for any sort of reaction, and pushing deeper in with any flinch. “No, you know what, I take out my fucking pus—”

“Then now we both have to kill you. You’re stupid. You’re wasting time,” Vårenträd said as the three of them were on their way to Raven, who realized that buying time for nothing in particular was not a good idea in such a small environment, and when the only saving grace was a stallion with no combat expertise.

“Wasn’t finished, you stinking ugly mutant factories. Fucking can’t believe that we could devolve into something this moronic. Yeah, no wonder you look like you took a brick to the face every day all the way to teens, yeah, that sounds right,” Raven kept talking, abusing all of her power to teleport short distances when they were about to get her. The odd whispery noise in her head that felt like it was coming from the horn clearly told that the magic destabilizer came offline with the engine.

“We don’t have to kill painlessly,” said the duo, and on the next teleport, by the bunks, Raven found herself right under the hooves of the goat. He stared down at her, expressionless. She shut her eyes one last time, and gave up. A gamble with a point decimal chance of leading to anything, but she had to take it. Good thing that she had not forgotten how to resist pain.

“Then back to the damn heart-taker with me. Sorry, Princess.”

Raven felt heavy goat hooves start to crush through her breast cage, heard the string come taut on a crossbow, and then a spear make a faint “whoosh” in the air, only ever so audible beyond the humming and wailing coming from outside. It was cold.

Then, with a grizzled roar and a brief moment of less cold, nothing happened but an unpleasant wet, crunching noise. The mare was confident that pain resistance was not that easy, as her experience would attest - and a pained yell and cough confirmed her suspicion a moment later.

“Southlanders are idiots,” Vårenträd said with disappointed frustration, soon unhearable over the pained whining and wheezing coming from Blueblood. “Now you’ve got us in trouble too. Wrong order... You are never worth it. Folk said we were soft, folk was right.”

“Våren…” Raven heard Viskavind say, Morozov weakly repeating after her. The rest was in their language, and obscured by the wind, and… the humming. The whispering in Raven’s horn did not get any better either. In fact, it got worse. She was really in trouble now.

However, that did not stop her from taking the opportunity. Despite multiple broken ribs, working of sheer defiance and hatred for the “engineers” who had left them to their own devices - or died - she opened her eyes, used the last of her magic to elevate the broken glasses out of her chest pocket, and lunged upwards. Vårenträd reacted very quickly, but not quickly enough, not for the animalistic strength and dexterity Raven pulled out of herself, and no doubt hampered by the frustration caused to her. It was all to some good, in the end, as the lower end of the glasses came off, so the sharp break of the two halves was just right enough to lodge right in one of large, bright blue eyes.

Before she could be hit by any rage kicks, the secretary hopped back, all of creation going numb, blank, blurry, and whirling at the same time. She went for another attack, scooting under the goat’s legs, and ramming herself into Viskavind’s. That did not throw the controlling mare’s stance off, but it did halt Raven’s roll, and the two’s reactions were just delayed enough that she rose up, feeling everything burn with each movement that concerned her chest, and lodge the other half of the glasses into one of the brightly glowing eyes. These ended up purple.

Raven was covered in… liquid, nothing was stable, everything swirled, patches of red encroached upon her vision, and every breath hurt. Her mind was staggered enough that the cries of pain were only a faint faraway. She looked at Blueblood, shuddering with a wide, gaping wound in the side of his chest, staring back right at her, a puddle of vomit by him on the bunk. A wide patch of jiggling red came over his eyes, in a manner unnatural enough for Raven to write that off as a thing of her own mind.

With no time for details, the mare’s mind scanned through opportunities and thoughts, bounced around by whispers in her horn and the mighty gusts of wind from the hole in the roof.

Saving breath for later, Raven made an excruciating leap upwards, pulled herself through burning hell to get herself on the roof, covered it with blood spittle, and entered a freezing hell instead. Her vision was all but gone, replaced by sheer blur, and only a consistent, thick, spastic red line crossing her vision. Perhaps a visual representation of her having gone into damage control.

She ran, into the crooked, snowy, freezing forest, and even when she collapsed, the red line persisted.

“She didn’t know, he died for me, she didn’t know, she didn’t know, he died for me, she didn’t know, she didn’t know, he died for me, what do I do”

Day Forty Two, P.2: Blue Blood

Prince Blueblood did not immediately recognize what had happened, or what it was that went through his head. In body terms, all that concerned him was holding a forehoof against the side of his chest, and staring directly forward - at nothing in particular, merely giving his mind space to think. There was too much information to process, far too much for him to reach any reasonable thought. And he needed one, ideally soon.

The information in need of processing consisted of raspy, pained screaming, swears in the Norse language, frenzied wailing of the wind outside, and a droning hum and whisper. None of them good signs, and none of them at all helping in his desperate attempt to ignore the rending pain in his body, or the puddle of liquid that was staining his bunk linens. That made it all very difficult, but he took on the challenge.

It was one thing to play yourself down and cool when diplomacy was your one way out - even if it ended up not being so - but another was to accept hopelessness for real. His life had purpose, reason, meaning, and he could not let it just… slip away for the sake of a foolish impulse. It seemed odd. Unfitting. He felt the pang in his heart and mind, but his soul was merely confused at best.

He tried to speak out, if only to feel a sense of progress. In the lowering temperature and the audio-visual assault on the senses that was the VIP cabin, it was direly needed and probably vital. Yet nothing came of it, no wise words to restore harmony, at least - nothing but wet coughs. The stallion’s brows furrowed, dropping beads of cold sweat off themselves. Certainly his main weapon would be diplomacy, and what good would unhygienic blood splittle add to a barely proven maybe-sort-of-not-exactly-a-Prince’s argument? None at all.

By when he had taken care of the blood that irritatingly kept trying to fill his mouth, he realized that he had not kept much track of the chaos. With unfocused, oddly blurred eyes, he looked the way of the three intruders. He was surprised, which caused another attempt at speech, which ended up in another spit of blood. Left standing was only the massive, torn-up, weakly twitching, intensely, dangerously radiating goat. The two mares lay on the ground, motionless, their snouts and limbs…

“Oh de—” the unicorn had managed his first two words, but instantly had to cover up his mouth, and enter a realm of absolute pain. To be exact, the breakfast and dinner they had with Raven came all the way out his mouth - as well as quite an amount of blood. The former was disgusting, the latter was excruciatingly painful. As his nervous system recognized pain, it remembered that he was, indeed, suffering from a large weapon having been stuck in his side, and responded accordingly. He did not recover soon - despite all his best efforts, which, he had to admit, were not much, his body’s pain threshold was far too low for all that.

As the pain mercifully went numb with the cold, and his mind drifted away into vapid, icy unconsciousness, the utter mess of body liquids surrounding him was joined with tears - the ones that did not freeze before dropping. The errant thought of the secretary stung deeper than he had anticipated.

It was all so much for the notion that a Prince stands steady and fast in face of even his most trusted one’s passing and going. She was gone, he knew, and the fate that the mare must have met outside made him feel horrible - but truly atrocious made him feel the fact that he somehow expected her to save the day. In the direst moment, when it had to have been him to rise up to the challenge, all he accomplished was putting himself out of working order, utterly misjudging the other one’s chances of salvaging it any better than himself. Raven had done so much for so long, he had grown to believe that she could do anything. It was only reasonable, he thought. It was all so much for reason, too…

The thought to cross his mind next was that he had completely forgotten about the fact that he was nearing death - something he immediately reprimanded himself for, as remaining alive had to be his main priority. There was no one else to salvage the situation in the Frozen North and Equestria both, after all. Nobody knew! Nobody reliable, that is. Nobody you could not expect to leave you for dead because you outmatched expectations.

He threw himself around, more mentally than physically, desperately trying to catch any train of thought. Eventually, all of them had departed so far away that he lost grip on even the freezing, crashed cabin. The stallion’s mind coursed through years and years of his life, and it was all so depraved and disgusting that he focused more on the jagged red line that lead him through the thoughts than the thoughts themselves. An occasional burst of sanity or two occurred, of course, but it appeared to have been some time until a complete word left his mouth. Coincidentally, that was when he felt something else than the dull, usual pain in the left side of his chest.

“I— I have to—” he mumbled to himself, and found that blood no longer leaked out of his mouth whenever he spoke. That was curious.

“No, I think I’m the one who tells you what you have to do, Prince,” a low, bassy, familiarly accented voice answered him. With the reminder that sounds existed, Blueblood also heard many a hum and a drum and a distant echo all around him, all blurry and incoherent. It was only her voice that was clear - by the end of the sentence, he had successfully realized that it was simply being repeated in his head. Telepathy, very simple. It was score one for him, a workable guess.

“But where— who—” he attempted to converse further, but his already unsteady speech was shaken further when he opened his eyes and felt intense physical pain from the bright lights. Many of them, multicolored, being passed over him. Although, for a correction, he quickly realized that it was him who was being passed under them. As soon as his body was able to feel movement, anyway.

“Well… Where I thought your stupid ass would never get to at this rate, honestly,” chuckled the female voice in response. Blueblood had regained control over most of his body, and found himself laying on a thick, furred platform, wide enough for him not to fall over as soon as he turned on his side. Despite his eyes still taking their time to readjust, abnormal time at that, the stallion could feel a physical presence right in front of his snout. It was big, hot, and smelled… odd, very odd. It was all very odd.

“And how do you—” the Prince spoke again, just as his eyes finally readjusted to see more than simple shapes, but was again bereft of vision as a stark, painful, thick red line crossed it. This time, however, his eyes kept themselves open, and Blueblood had ample time to see what the line did not cover - an arching, old, stone hall above, ruined statues to the sides, decrepit stained glass, bright red torches on the walls, as well as similarly colored tapestries hanging every other turn. Lastly, he saw the line take shape. It was at the side now, and moved slightly as the voice said:

“Aha, look who’s up and working again. We’re almost there, too. How nice.” The large shape that the red jaggy line tilted. “I don’t think you need the collar anymore.”

Suddenly, his eyes blinked on their own accord, and the odd vibration and hum and discomfort that would so often accompany the peculiar line disappeared. What hid behind the eldritch, disturbing, invasive thing caused the Prince to jolt where he lay.

“You’re still a wimp, Blueblood. You’re the best of your kind that I’ve got, but you still remind me why I’m doing all this in the first place. And, really… thanks,” spoke the… pony?.. It had to be what the two that attacked them spoke of, and the longer he looked at it, the more he realized that they had a point. He was in the company of something plain foul.

It was large, massive. Bigger than even other Northfolk. A large, wide head, which resembled more that of a predator than a herbivoral equine. Thick, visibly sharp fur, colored on the brink between brown and red. Muscular lines and veins popping out far enough to be visible even through the fur. Huge, almost sparkling, barely blinking owl-yellow eyes positioned even more frontmost than any pony’s. A fiery red mane tied into two long, thick tails which hung off the sides of the sharp ears. When it… she?.. spoke, the teeth would be visible, and there were more than ever needed to be. Some of them had pointed ends. The neck that the head was attached to was proportionately thick.

“What is… the meaning of this?..” the Prince managed a sentence, but did not manage to hold back the utter terror that having that near his face caused him. In particular after he realized that what he had considered to be possible construction works far away - somebody had to have renovated the clearly ancient place they were in, after all - was simply the thud of the… mare’s… hooves.

“Well… Right now it’s a pronoun, I think? Sorry. Not that great at the mess you speak in down there.” She… smiled. Grinned. Blueblood’s irises shrunk, eyes unable to look away from her mouth, which she seemed all too glad to show off. There were multiple rows of teeth. The smell became even more unidentifiable - not foul, definitely nothing like a bad mouth. But most certainly something unbearably wrong.

“That was not exactly what I mean,” he said, breathing quickly and deeply, having to balance between primal terror, regular terror, confusion, anxiety, diplomacy, curiosity, and several metric tons of pent-up complaints and shouts. “I’m worried, well, considering where I last recall myself… and the rest… oh dear. Just, um. Why am I here, where is my crew, and… uhmmm…” Blueblood took some time to finish the sentence, accidentally having looked the… mare… in the eyes. “...how can I help you?..”

“You’re here because I don’t have it easy, your crew is nowhere good, and you can shut up and look for yourself. We’ve arrived.” A hoof the size of his entire head tapped him on the shoulder, tattering his clothes. He was invited to leave the slab he was laying on with the motion of a monstrous head, but took some time. While his mind was definitely in disorder, he was sure that his suit - his body, in fact - had to have a large hole in it. Both were missing, and, well, he was not in horrible pain either. That lifted his spirits for a moment, as evidently he was required in one piece. Less reason for them to harm him. So far. “Take your time, I’m only about to punch you in the face,” spoke the… mare… with a very overt tone of impatience and despisal to her voice. The proposition seemed less than welcome, and Blueblood did his best to leave the slab gracefully.

Once he got off, he saw that he was being carried by four regular-sized Northfolk in thick furred clothing and various markings that seemed to radiate in the perplexing mosaic of colors created by the stained glass windows. No northerners he had seen had any of those, let alone all over their bodies, and no stained glass he had seen cast light as odd and hypnotizing as these. Him having left the slab, the four stretched their now comparatively regular bodies, and rather quickly disappeared to the sides, before he could get any better a look - far faster than anyone of their size should have. Blueblood’s gaze shifted rightwards, to where the one they left him with stood, and how quickly… she... turned around to stare at him indicated that no matter the size, movements this quick seemed to be rather common.

He saw now that, indeed, proportion was in order for all the deformities and bestial oddnesses. The thing in front of him was huge. Massive. Gargantuan. He had been to a museum once, where various extinct species were scaled life-sized compared to ponies. If not for the obvious advantage of the top-heavy body, this… this could have beaten a minotaur. As it stood, only a few heads’ worth were missing. It was almost amusing to imagine just how many animals had to be skinned in order to make appropriate clothing - wolves, rather familiar ones, judging by the sharp texture of the bright white fur that adorned its… her… shoulders. The thought lost the inkling of amusement once he looked at the rest of the body. Legs covered in intricate, ornamented, thick metal, oddly shaped patches attached to the flanks, over the cutiemarks - if the northerners even had any. Many other details too, and just off-putting enough to not make sense for a suit of armor, yet fit together all too fine. Bad as it was, it turned even worse once he looked at the forelegs, in particular the chains wrapped around each one lumps on the sides. Those were no lumps, those were sheathes, and contained in them were… weapons, that was for sure, and the bottoms of them were chained to the forelegs. That seemed… alarmingly intricate.

“I said look for yourself. Not stare at me,” came the annoyed order, and one of the pillar-like forelegs moved to point him somewhere behind herself and to the right. The chains on the leg rattled as she did so, and, under the new angle, all the metal on it looked thicker yet. And yet, the movement was quick, swift, almost careless.

“...right,” he said with a gulp, and nodded. His head moved, but his eyes remained on the… mare… for a few seconds more. When they finally detached, he saw what he was being pointed to.

They stood in front of a large, long, wide hall, filled with broken benches, and a once-precious pedestal at the end of it, with the hugest stained glass to be seen yet at the far end of it. It was all surrounded by tapestries - and yet, it was all blank, the glass, the fabric, all of it seemed… void. Perhaps fittingly so, as between the two of them and the far end of it were nearly countless wraiths. Some faint, some nearly living-looking, but all of them standing still, looking directly in front of themselves, and, stranger yet… None of them looked right. It was unpleasant to recall, but Blueblood did not take long to realize what it was - somehow, none of them were the sickly green of the wraiths he had seen before. They were all at least a faint red.

“Recognize it? They read you stories about him when you’re little, don’t they?” came a question his way. With the added consciousness, Blueblood realized that although the voice no longer sounded in his mind, its real world application still reverberated in a disturbing manner.

“Ummm… I… don’t think I see what you would mean,” he answered honestly.

The reverberation came out hard with a loud sigh.

“There. The pedestal. Or are you nearsighted too? Who knows how far they’ve inbred your lot…”

Quick to not soil the already shaky relationship between the two nations any further - common sense told him that whoever he was talking to had to be important - Blueblood squinted to look at the far end. Indeed, he saw an object.

A large block of ice, slightly blending into the featureless stained glass, and a curved, black and red stone inside of it. Although… not a stone. Only a second of thought rang an anxious alarm bell in the stallion’s mind, as, indeed, he did recognize it from the few childhood memories that counted as memories. The few happy ones, quite surprisingly. Albeit the subject matter for them was less than happy.

That was a horn. A unicorn horn from an age when unicorn diversity was somewhat… broader than it was in his age. And despite how silly the thought appeared, Blueblood had no one else to think of upon seeing the black of the horn and the red of the ornaments on it.

“Don’t hit me, but… That… Would look like King Sombra to me. Just… a guess,” he spoke to the one who awaited an answer. It came, too, in the form of several quick consecutive quakes. Some effort was required for him not to fall. That was a short applause from his… host, gently knocking one of the massive hooves against the floor.

“Not all of him, thankfully.” The huge body turned to face where Blueblood was facing, instead of staring right at him. “And, gods willing, we’ll keep it that way.”

“Holy heavens…” the stallion could not help but whisper, hearing his own voice echo out to him from the corners of the hall. “But how, and why?”

“It wasn’t easy, you can be sure of that,” came the response, coupled with a clattery shrug. “But worth it. High risk, high reward, right? Sometimes you make a weapon out of one enemy to kill another.” The head turned, and flashed Blueblood another two-rowed grin. “I like that the one time your kind does something right, it’s that that kills them all.”

“So you wish to see Equestria dead, is that right?” he risked a question.

“Eh-heh, little Prince. I don’t wish to see Equestria at all,” answered his… captor?.. and turned her owl eyes to him, piercing him through and through. “I know you do, though. And how, oh-ho, yeah. I’m in your head even now.”

Blueblood’s snout curled into a grimace, but he shut his eyes and sighed. No, he was definitely needed alive.

“Then you’d know that it’s a familiar sensation.”

“Well, I’m not as good as the damn serpent was, no. I make up for it with my looks, though, don’t I? All of us do up here.” It… she flashed him a grin and a mockingly coquette tilt of the head and bend of a leg. The thick tails hanging off the mane swung a little, hitting bits of the armor, making sounds as if an entire tree trunk was being smashed against them. “You know how we came to be? Northfolk, you call us? Thank your ancestors, colt. Maybe I wasn’t there when it happened, but when they cast us after it turned out that your Tribes wanted to be together, they probably thought we’d all die out. The one place that didn’t thaw out. Sent your own kin there for your own petty reasons. We lived, though, didn’t we? And how.”

“Another villain, aren’t you? Equestria’s had many. It’s still there,” Blueblood said, wary of the implication, and trying to coat it just a little. That seemed to fail for a moment, as the mare turned to him and began to slowly walk his way. He attempted to back out, but that only lead to him being forced to backpedal toward the pedestal, through a few turns. The beastly thing was predator enough to know to herd.

The yellow eyes pierced his entire skull. Again, a coy grin flashed the terrifying teeth. The eyes went half-closed, and the head tilted even more teasingly. A chuckle escaped the wide mouth.

“And you know what it’s like right now, little Prince-nobody-cares-who. Let’s cut the shit, right? I’m sick of remembering words all the time. You’ve already figured out who I am and what I need, no?”

“Umm… you…” the Prince thought fast, having no actual idea up to that point. He began to add up clues. To his surprise, something did manifest. “You… have been leading us around this frozen hellscape, haven’t you? Or… well… no, Raven or those turncoats, they never saw it… What you kept stuffing in my eyes with your…” He had to think, as “magic” was barely the word for what their lot appeared to be using. “...arcanery. No, I’m special to you for some reason. You… oh. Wait, no… Oh, that… That simple, is it?..”

“Yeah. That simple.”

“So it’s your… your kind that are the… rebels. Not the others, they’re not all with you, are they? That was why they sent me here, wasn’t it. To discuss you. Whether you exist at all or not. And you want me to stay silent?”

A slow shutting of the eyes and a deep, rumbling sigh suggested otherwise.

“Well… for what you are… Almost right, yes. You see, famous Equestrian Princes don’t show up here all eight days of the week. Here you come, though. To the Jarl, that’s a problem. And to me, that’s an opportunity. Let me explain…” threateningly, the warped eyes stared straight into his, and a forehoof ordered him to move alongside. They walked, slowly for her, almost running for him, down the incredibly lengthy hall, apparitions to both their sides. “The one who wants you silent is the Jarl. Our - well, their - own leader doesn’t want your lands to know that we even exist. Them, and us. “Northfolk” and, ah-heh, “rebels”. Keep the Frozen North a boring chunk of snow and ice at the head end of the continent, please nobody care. Wants nobody to know that we’ve made pacts that make your fur stand on edge. That we’ve been there for centuries. That we have eyes and mouths in more of your cities than you’d like, and that some of your government already… knows we’re there. Or that, simply saying…” With an abrupt stop, they halted barely halfway to the pedestal, at a peculiar round shape in the wide carpet that lead to it. Blueblood dared not speak, as his whole coat did, in fact, stand on edge. The odd, inexplicable smell began to intensify, and soon afterward… the red line came back. But not over his eyes - over the mare’s forelegs, instead, and her mouth.

Her body began to twitch abnormally, almost painfully, and her mouth began to make noises - noises that the Prince already somehow knew were words. Even hearing them made his ears hurt, and imagining them being said caused his tongue to curl. An equine mouth was not made to pronounce these sounds. It was all so wrong that he could but watch. It was so wrong that he could not even come to question whether it was real. Something this warped could not be hallucinated. Even with what he had gone through, he was not that insane, nobody could be.

Time’s passing became abstract, but it felt all too soon that a flux of dark red erupted from the center of the carpet. With the same unsettling speed, a limb emerged from it. A limb, just that - Blueblood had no way of describing it. No expert in fauna of any kind, but he would bet that something like this - a twisted sickle with leech-like lumps, damp tumors all over, and tiny needles surrounding the cracked, red carapace - could only be reserved for something that Equestria shuddered to bear. Yet more of the limb’s owner followed, and all much the same. At least the Prince could sensibly explain what it was - it was a gaping mouth on multi-jointed legs. The inside of the cavity was… an abyss, one Blueblood felt he would rather not look into.

“...simply saying, this is what we’ve got on our side. I’m not this pretty because of good genes, or adaptation, or evolution, either,” the… barely a pony… reminded the stallion that there was more to life than just averting his gaze from where it never should have treated in the first place. “How do you think are your ponies going to feel about it?”

“Oh you blasted—” he said with a gasp, finally shutting his eyes and lowering his head as far into his shoulders as he could. “Not very well, no, no, no. This is all wrong, this entire place is wrong, yes, but this, oh holy sweet mother, no, this is, nonono—”

A foreleg got stretched out in front of his face, and the threat of getting his whole snout pointing out the back of his head was still not enough to make him unsee what he had seen. It somehow got worse the more he thought about it. After a short while, the leg shook a bit, rattling the chains that kept the sheathed weapon in place, finally breaking him out of the catharsis. It was then lowered, and nothing was where the summoned thing used to be.

“Yeah, ugly, is it, huh? You don’t like it, do you, little colt?”

“Not one bit, no.”

“But you don’t like Equestria either. You like it even less, Blueblood.”

“You can’t—”

“In your head, remember? Let me phrase for you. We’re nasty, mean, wrong. They? They could be nice, kind, right. And instead they… well, they look prettier. You have horrible taste in mares, too.”

“I… I— you—… well… maybe,” he lowered his head in defeat. It never worked out at all, did it?..

“So… got it yet?..” Alongside the question came a quake to signal that they were moving again.

“M-maybe you should… I think I… no,” Blueblood struggled to complete a sentence. He was met with a sigh and a grumble.

“If someone that at least a few of your stupid ponies recognize from the funny pictures suddenly comes up and starts speaking about this… You think they’ll like it? You’re a Prince, like it or not. I don’t want you to hide us, Blueblood,” the damned thing spoke with a massive grin, tasting the words like fresh meat. “I want you to advertise us. Let them all know. Let them try to come for us, or prepare. Let them rot where they stand if they like to. Let them throw blame around and see who to banish this time. But, no matter what, I want them to know, when they try this hard to forget. You didn’t even know that there were ponies here before now, did you? And now you’ll have everyone know.”

The stallion took a while to comprehend what was being said. In particular that he was walking side to side with something that aimed to - and was well on the way - to outmatching that which he was cautioned with as a foal. Worse than the chaos of Discord, the betrayal of Nightmare Moon, or the tyranny of King Sombra. And the worst of all… that it had a point. He almost slapped himself, but it did. There was no denying himself, and he knew it. Ridiculous as it was, but the evil plan at work… was to safely get him home and let him do exactly, precisely what he wished to do anyway.

He, Prince Blueblood, was already on their side. As he reached that conclusion, another stop had his… lead… give him another quick series of applause quakes.

“Smart idiot colt. So?”

He… Prince Blueblood… was already on their side. Only… only. Only… his mind had begun to race, full and proper. Scratches, tears, mumbles, cries, tears, wails, pleas. The stallion’s nostrils flared, the eyes enlarged, the mouth hung open, the head shook. Hopelessly, he tried to utter a stream of “nonononononono”, and yet his mind was already on the train of thought, and there was only one station to reach.

“I’m not a Prince,” he said blandly, muttering. It took some time to be understood, as the reply came only some seconds later.

“What, you psycho now?”

“I’m not actually a Prince. None of my bloodline are. Haven’t been for generations. We’re illegitimate. Some four hundred years ago, my quarter-grandfather faked documents, staged a coup, ended the Unicornian dynasty, then it was us. Nobody noticed. I’m a Prince only on paper. I’m…” He began to giggle, his head shaking. His mind went back to the start of the horrible journey, when he was weaker than even now, finding solace in that which ponies he thought could be trusted left there for him so that he be less of a problem. So that he think less. “...I’m a paper prince. And…” He turned his head to the giantess, now grinning himself. “...I’ll tell them that.”

All of his being yelled at him that that was the worst idea of all. Yet, in some way… it felt right. The sense of righteousness, the obscure thing, was the only thing that did not scream and yell at him. So he listened to it some more.

“You’re just… just scaring me, you’re just scaring me. Oh, you’re going to tell me your entire plan. Yes, yes you are. Tell me everything, I come back home, I tell them it all, probably exaggerate, too, and there is panic. Riots, death, murder, we kill ourselves for you. Yes, you’d want that. Oh you’d want that. Don’t want to deal with these things that you just pulled out of nowhere neither, no? No, this is your plan. You know what we are like. Fragile. We’re all fragile. And riots, oh-ho-ho-no-no-no, Celestia and Luna can’t stop them by sending those BLASTED mares at something mean and nasty, no? And after we’re on edge after the changelings, they can’t campaign for peace all that easily, no, they have to take action! Or they send them at you, and you murder them all, you will! Or - they take action, and the only action is tyrannical, so they give them cause to rebel! And even if not - you’ve perverted Equestria further than it has you! Ha! Ahah! Hahaaaaahahaaaa! HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!”

The stallion danced in place, throwing himself all around, and galloped forward, to the pedestal. He knew full well he was not to be killed, and even if he was, it was only him to be in danger. Blueblood… was… free.

“You’ve thought of everything! You have ponies in the government who know, but aren’t important enough! They don’t have “Prince” stamped on them! Ahaaahaaaahahah!” He nearly pronked up the circular stairs to the pedestal that held the ancient, dormant king’s preserved horn. “Because... because without them, they’d just shut me up, or throw me to the loonhouse! But… now… nonono… aha… No, you… You’re… you’re all so… so wrong, wrong, wrong, but you… You think…”

“What the fuck are you—”

“You… think… like… US. Vile! Calculating! Two-faced! All a facade! Bleeding heavens, the Griffon Empire has more dignity than all the ponies combined! Run away, drop me off to fit a straitjacket, ramble on about harmony all we will, but...” Blueblood continued to rant even as he tripped and rolled down the stairs. “ You, you mutated freaks… think… the same! Centuries living in frozen hell and nothing has changed! Oh this is all so simple, I had to have been mental not to see it ever before!”

“You are crazier than I thought. Shit. ”

“Look, who’s, TALKING!!!” he pointed a hoof at her while trying to get up, and fell down again. “My world… all of my world… so stupid. I can do what I want, you know.” He finally got up, and walked forward, slowly, grinning obscurely. “You… need me… for something else. Wait, no… got it.”

“Din... inavlade... kuksugare.”

“You didn’t just… get half a thousand wraiths in here for no reason. Ohhooo. You won’t be showing it off to me if it wasn’t working, and it isn’t, nonono. These aren’t even moving. You… You’ve got them… but not all of them.” He reached the pedestal, which, by then, the giant beast had followed him to, and leaned against it, laughing still, and coughing. “There’s some ritual you want me for, don’t you.”

Suddenly, he was roughly grabbed, and held to face her snout to maw. His tired, crazed grin against her terrifying one.

“Think you’re smart. Look at me, I’m a Prince, I act crazy and know everything now, and you’re all stupid. Well, good pony,” came a compliment, and his head was gently patted. The bruises made it a little hard for him to open one eye. “Only I’m a bit not stupid. I do know a thing now. You’re a paper prince. That’s what it says.”

“That’s what… what says?..” he asked, taken aback.

“You don’t have to know,” she spoke with venom, grinning even wider, and her teeth could take up three pony heads. They would chop them right off, too. “But you… You’re still like them, you know. You want to do good, no evil. Want them to live because it’s better or something. Well... “ He was forced to look at the hundreds of red shapes, past the block of ice with the horn. “...an army of wraiths is a good backup if I can’t kill you all by irony, hm? You’re smart here. I need you for this. You made it easy, actually, thanks.”

“How…”

“Four times a grandfather, hmmm? Funny, I know Equestrian history. Exactly three Unicornian Princes before you, one disappeared and never came back. They tell you why? No, they haven’t.”

By then, he simply listened with his mouth open. His rattled, addled mind was comprehending the fact that his outburst… failed. And his innards were being squeezed by a hulking monstrosity, too.

“He studied too much, he knew too much, he did magic, and one day… he found out.” There was a grin. “That in the North there were bad things, and that Jarlinda Runa of the Frozen North Provinces was up to no good. He left, came here, and…” The grin managed to show a blink of emotion - amusement. “...actually did something to me. I don’t show the years, though, do I?”

Blueblood’s eyes widened, and had begun to try out bit by bit.

“We were already in deep with this… arcanery… as you call it, back then. It was some time after the rocks went away,” Runa nodded at the encased horn. “So he found a loophole, the bearded bastard did. Those that I took in… the dead hated them now. No way to control, only… ah… expunge, that’s what you say now. It was exorcize back then.”

“Ohhh…”

“Rohhh. We’ve been working on that, though, haven’t we? And then it turns out that the freak learned from us and bound it to his blood.” Disturbingly, very disturbingly, the mouth widened further yet, and the odd smell became intolerable. “I liked him, a little. He got it. It takes stuff to learn blood ties. He did it, though, it was that bad, he thought, and he was a smart little colt. Even smarter than you, Blueblood. Only ponies go away, but I don’t.”

The startling growl blew the surviving parts of Blueblood’s mane back like a strong wind. He was covered in spittle, faintly pink, and hot on his skin.

“So… We won’t need to rob Unicornian graves and look for flesh and blood to regrow now, huh? We won’t need Unicornians at all.”

“Oh dear.”

“Not so smart now, no?”

“No.”

“How do you feel?”

“Empty.”

The paper prince stared into the alien eyes for almost a minute, and soon there was only one grin to go around. It added in subtlety - now it could only chop off two pony heads.

“I’ll do what you say. I’ll come back home. I’ll tell everyone, your spies keep me out of trouble. Equestria will fester and rot. Maybe they’re already having it do that, maybe we’re doing it on our own, maybe both. Maybe. Maybe… I’m too much of an idealist,” he conceded to reason.

“Smart pony. We’ll get you to Pierce Heaven. Don’t try anything funny there. I WILL get your blood, I mix two drops, and I’ve got all this running errands for me. The bastards at the fortress won’t kill you even if you try your best to fuck up. They won’t want to be found either,” said Runa and released him from the grip. Everything ached all over. The hulking Jarlinda turned around and cast a glance at the apparitions. “Kanske senare,” she mumbled under her breath.

Sighing, the descendant of the one who once did something, simply stood in place. Grieving, but realizing that the painful talk was over, he risked to ask:

“Can I know where my crew went after all? I… can’t see them in there,” he pointed at the crowd that he took a few glances at. Oddly enough, their faces seemed all so clear. “They’re barely ponies, but then… are there any ponies for what I think they should be?”

“After we got our little hounds to stop your cars? Well, I don’t know if many of the colts from the big one with the guns lived. Funny, I know some did. That’s weird. I sent very weak ones, yeah, and they were far away, but… your guys were tough. Don’t often see anyone prepared for this place. These, almost,” Runa told him, almost casually, as if not an abomination upon the world. The stallion thought back to the supposed engineers, and sighed at how he imagined that him and them were becoming something of a functional crew. He was being humored, and then he was being sent to the scrap heap for misbehaving royalty. To think that the escapee had such a good point. But then, had he listened, what then, what difference? No point. No point in any of it.

“And… Raven?.. She was with me when we were… held up.” Blueblood’s ears tried to hang, but one still hurt, and the other was a little frozen. Oddly, even that seemed forced. Obliged to feel remorseful or sad, more so than being genuine. Raven manipulated and most likely wholly despised him, and would have seen him wrapped in blankets and chomping on a pacifier if she had her way - not for his sake, but for her own. It was her task, and all the care she provided was so that she feel good about herself. Amusing parallels arose. Raven was quite a pony in that regard - nearly a living manifestation of Equestria’s attitude to those it thought to keep in its harmony. Living or not, though? By the end of that thought, Blueblood realized he cared remarkably little.

“Don’t look at every death we get. But I know she wasn’t anywhere, and she was alone. Unless her and those guys found each other? Froze to death by now.”

“Right.”

He cared, indeed, so remarkably little, that he was simply blank, eyes staring as if painted onto his face.

And with that, Blueblood took the quickest action in his life, and lunged at the block of ice on the pedestal.

“Vad?!...” the dumbstruck beastly mare shouted, not comprehending the utterly thoughtless, reason-depraved action of the unicorn. It utterly slipped her telepathic overwatch, and when she lunged after, it was already too late. The block of ice…

He had absolutely no idea, or thought at all, about this. The ice could have been too thick, for one. And then there were a thousand thousands of things wrong.

And yet, through the neatly cracked ice, he took the horn, and, seconds before Runa reached him, stabbed himself in the chest with all the strength he could muster. Momentarily, a roar erupted from inside the once-bodypart, and black smoke filled the hall. It twisted and twitched, albeit in much a different way than the oddities surrounding Runa’s summoned beings, and… gained a face. It stared at them with empty eyes and fangs sharp for but a second. In that second, Blueblood gained understanding of it all, and the perverted Northfolk Jarlinda flung her weapons out - two tools similar to a lumberjack’s axe, but curved, and with actual teeth on their chopping edges. The chains that held them levitated in the air by themselves, acting as tendrils to the already eldritch thing that their wielder was.

Once the second passed, the smoke drained from the room and upwards through a negligible crack in the ceiling. In so doing, it screamed, deafeningly, but one word:

“CRYSTALS”

The terrible things inside the hall remained where they had been. Blueblood simply stood up, a large, gaping wound in his chest, much like before, while Runa threw her head left and right, searching for words, failing to find them in her own language. She turned to him, owl eyes filled with fury, and the pony looked back at her. She was left with her mouth open.

Blueblood, rather casually, ascended back up the stairs, while Runa remained below, whispering to herself. Soon, she followed after him, and he felt the massive hooves try to hold, crush, restrain him. He… slipped through.

“These are my last words. There is… no rest,” he said quietly, with a cough, but the hall transferred his words loudly, with an echo. “An aimless spirit in a broken body.”

The wretched language erupted from the mare’s lips again, but the lonely, beaten, self-abused paper prince simply leaned against where Sombra’s horn used to be, and looked into the crowd. Fearful energies surrounded him, dark red, pink, sickly purple, the familiar jiggly lines, and yet he still saw.

He saw old nobles turn their heads to him. He saw recent casualties of the North Patrol stand at attention, and, some distance from them, over a hundred of older ones do so as well. He saw Vårenträd and Vildefløy, Viskavind and Vänsterfält stand in a row of other large Northfolk ponies and look his way. He saw Morozov and about a dozen other goats raise their heads. He saw Jean-Luc de Sade Jr. open his blank eyes, and, next to him, Oswald Krueger, head of a long lost Paranormal Division squad, join him, much like many other griffons, be they masked or not. He saw cows, deer, zebras, thestrals, kelpies, and kin that he never even knew of, he saw capricorns and seaponies, all aim their eyes at where he stood. At least four dragons of varying build and size, a few dozen changelings, even a centaur. Some odd, tall, twisted, almost spidery dark shape at the very back end. In the middle between the rows, a limping, old, tall, bearded horse tried to find a standing place, and weakly shook its hoof when none would budge to let him through. There were so many names, and suddenly, it was as if Blueblood knew most, if not all of them. He even waved to his grand-grand-grandfather.

“The horn is in pieces. The King… is loose. Our spell is shattered, but life had drained off, long ago. There is no sunrise, I fear.” His voice was almost eaten up by the spastic attempts of the accursed warlock, and yet he knew he was heard. His vision was nothing but horrid red, but he saw that red was anything the apparitions were becoming.

“Everything is rotting. Flesh I had is rotting. I’m… left here with you, I fear. You don’t have to listen. The spell tells you to, maybe, but you don’t have to. I will speak anyway.”

Somehow, the wraiths had all gathered - they looked right at him, over a thousand of eyes, all focused on the fake prince who only ever spoke off a paper in public, and even then failed miserably. Not even at beauty contests that he had been rigged to win could he ever say a word right.

“I can’t give you back your lives. I can’t turn time backwards. I can’t take you to your loved ones, not unless they died with you in here. We are accursed, and there is only oblivion. The harsh reality.”

Slowly, the substance of the wraiths had begun to change. Subtly, steadily, they went blurry - perhaps, indeed, exiting. In the corner of his eye, however, Blueblood saw, over the veil of horror, that the tapestries and stained glass… began to change as well. He gave not even a shrug.

“But I can make you free. I… have learned… something. I am Blueblood, an Equestrian Prince. You hate me, most of you would. I know something you don’t, however. And… you listen.”

Idly, he raised his head and took in an empty breath. The words came to him simply, easily. In the span of a few seconds, he reviewed his entire life. It fueled his words efficiently, substantially. He looked to his side, staring at Runa, surrounded by unspeakable entities, who threw her head side to side, saying words that Blueblood could neither understand nor care to hear - he saw enough. Then he looked through the walls of the old great hall of the thrice-previous capital of the Frozen North, now the center of deadlands so off the map that not even the main Equestrian bastion in the area would know how to get to it without ruthless casualties. He looked at Equestria, at Canterlot, and at the Princesses. He gave a bored, breathless sigh.

Then he raised his head and stared intensely at his audience, tearing right through the warped curtain around him to put his hooves on the lectern.

“Broken… Abandoned… Forgotten… Brethren. In a mere half dozen of weeks, barely a breath for that which circles this chunk of celestial soil, I, an Equestrian Prince, have crossed this frozen hell. I have learned the meaning of purpose, dedication, integrity, loyalty, and leadership. Though it was a quiet road, some have told me, were I to come home and drench my words in lie, I would have been made legend. I have been taught lessons by outlanders, old villains, mere animals, and things beyond all of our comprehension. And what was it that I was taught, that I learned, that started with me blind like a newborn and ended with this? What is this lesson which you have gathered to hear me teach you as well?”

Many other Northfolk wearing odd apparel, and bigger than their already oversized compatriots, have entered the hall, but were separated from their leader by the hundreds of wraiths. With each second, their glow, a stronger by the second blue, pushed them further back.

“It is nothing. There is no lesson. No reason, no integrity, no loyalty. It is mindless, pretense. This world is mindless. No cause, no consequence, only a string of events that we scramble to put together. One thing leads not to another, one thing leads at all, if it even is. You are dead, you all are, and you are young, and old, and strong, and weak, and innocent, and guilty, and honest, and deceitful, and so on - but no. You are nothing. I am nothing. All a nothing, a big great nothing, perhaps not even separate. We are information, at best. You know it, all of you do, and for longer than I have. You know that there is no difference. We are dead. They are alive.”

The hundreds began to raise their arms. Combat-ready, they started to salute, all in silence.

“All are naught. Plain differences, but naught nevertheless. And in my difference, I wish the best, the simplest, the most peaceful. I wish… for harmony. I now know where it is. Not under the yoke of the ones who warp themselves to gain identity, and not in oblivion of surrender. It is in action that may… be meaningful.”

The old nobles unsheathed their antiquated blades from their sheathes, if even from each other’s bodies. The North Patrol cocked their weaponry, and stomped their fortified hooves against the floor, leaving blue, sizzling crackles and sparks. Vårenträd and Vildefløy, Viskavind and Vänsterfält, many other Northfolk took their weapons and soundlessly banged them together in unison. Morozov and the other goats manifested with a variety of firearms, unleashing rapid volleys into the ceiling, emitting ghostly, yet tangible, blue particles. Jean-Luc de Sade Jr. raised his javelin high, and with him near a hundred other griffons saluted too, and Oswald Krueger launched a festive barrage upwards, joined by at least ten more similarly clothed avians. All other species rumbled in unison, and eventually, they gained a voice.

“WE ARE A NOTHING! THEY ARE A NOTHING! LET! EQUESTRIA! FAAALL!!!” Blueblood shouted at the height of his strength, and far outdid his vocal chords. The headlights of blue that shone from his eyes and chest threw themselves spastically, drawing shapes on the ceiling, as he trembled in ecstasy.

“FEALLAN!” came a cheer from the nobles.

“FALL!” cried out the ponies.

“FALLA!” yelled the Northfolk.

“ПАДЕТ!” screamed the goats.

“TOMBERA!” chanted the griffons, joined with a “WIRD FALLEN!”

By when the rest had joined in, the hall was a perfect, shining blue. What parts were decrepit had been restored with a new, blue glow to them, and the tapestries and stained glass all gained in image. They now showed many an image, but each all too familiar to that which Blueblood so disregardingly recalled. That which called for his attention, however, was the centerpiece of each. A turn of the body showed that the biggest tapestry and the biggest stained glass of them all, right behind him, bore only that.

A crystal compass, covered in blue liquid.

He had his hoof come near his mouth and his chest. Blueblood looked at his new, blue blood.

“BLOOD!” again he shouted.

“BLŌD!” cheered the nobles.

“BLOOD!” cried the ponies.

“BLOD!” yelled the Northfolk.

“КРОВЬ!” screamed the goats.

“SANG!” chanted the griffons. “BLUT!”

“BLOD! BLOD! BLOOOD!” wailed Runa as her own weapons tore into the flesh of her face, the eldritch summoned creations standing by her side and looking at her twist and tremble. “JAG SKA GE ER BLOD!”

The cold, empty chaos almost obscured the earthquake that the reemerging Crystal Empire caused the Frozen North. In all the depravity, death, and decay that happened daily in the Equestria’s chilly old attic of forgotten, unnerving, unneeded memories, it was merely a few quakes, and then it was back to normal. Less so for Equestria itself. And that thought made Blueblood’s radiant veins and the vacant spot on the left of his chest glow a little warmer, as warm as something of the Frozen North could be.

Day Sixty Eight: Epilogue

Prince Blueblood shot up from bed shrieking, his eyes bulging out, and his thrashing throwing the linens off his body. He quickly ran out of breath and succumbed to a coughing fit, his head collapsing back on the pillow. From there, he stared into the plain cement ceiling, several prolonged lamps casting light down on him. The stallion breathed quickly, intensely, and stopped only when he heard an artificial sounding chirp nearby. Coughing in confusion, the Prince decided to simply take a moment and assess the situation.

He was only done attempting to shriek with his freshly coughed out voice when his body realized that its eyes were about to burn out through dehydration. Forcefully, they were shut, and that was when he managed to scream properly - without the environment of the relatively plain, angular room, there was much more room for him to remember and envision.

Blueblood spent a long, long time reminiscing. In truth, a good portion of that time was spent with him having returned to unconsciousness, eyes unwilling to open again, but that did not diminish the rush of recollection any. To decide whether legitimate nightmares were any comparison to memories was to pick between a gallows pole and a guillotine. He knew he was awake when he had began to laugh.

“Oh, this is so stupid,” the stallion thought to himself, mouth too occupied coughing out crying laughter. “This makes no sense. There is no way this can happen. Nothing adds up. No reason. No purpose.”

A sharp breath through his nostrils, followed by a series of neurotic twitches that saw the linens thrown off once more, brought to his attention another nonsensical fact. A familiarity, actually. He knew the smell, he did, even though he had no business being able to smell it, it had no business being there, it had no business existing in the first place, and it was quite perfect.

“Maybe I’ve won,” he continued to think. “Maybe this is how it works now.”

“Prince Blueblood,” called to him a low, accented voice. Maybe too fitting, considering who bore the odor, but still.

“Maybe, heh-heh,” he replied with a chuckle of near boredom. Why, the stallion could not tell. He had won, and that put so much out of the equation that he just had no idea.

“Get yourself into shape, you southlander walking pile of a thousand screw-ups. We have to talk before they come get you for examination,” came the voice again. Male, in fact. He was also pushed by something very hard and a little cold. The coat neglected to stand on edge.

“Aeh?..” the Prince vocalized lackadaisically.

“They’ll want to see how alive you are, and soon. The doctors, Prince Blueblood, the Pierce Heaven medical specialists. Annoying, frustrating, paranoid noisy lot that I do not want to even think about right now. I don’t want them here, but there’s only so much I can do to delay them from meeting someone they purportedly brought back from the dead,” spoke the voice matter-of-factly, slightly higher pitched now that the Prince’s hearing had adjusted, and with significantly less of an accent. “I am just Jarl, after all, it isn’t like they have to obey my spoken command, no-no-no, I have to call in my connections to throw them for a loop. Ingrates.”

“What.”

“Prince Blueblood… there’s not much time. Nobody’s supposed to be in here, you see, and I… am. They can’t do anything to me, but they will pay a lot of attention to you if we’re not quick. And you?” A big equine approached him, the Prince felt. His eyes remained closed, but his ears had perked up where he lay, and heard a series of thuds. Strange rhythm to them. Maybe nonsensical, but… No, this was all not wrong enough. “Trust me, you don’t want that.”

“What.” Repeating himself was more of a means to push the conversation somewhere - himself, he focused on opening his eyes. They opened groggily, but they did. He turned his head and looked at the northerner by his bed. Absolutely towering. Standing on his hind legs, in fact. A pegasus, enormous wings moving ever so slightly to remain in the air. Color of dark vanilla, adorned in much important-looking clothing. Faint memories of Canterlot life allowed Blueblood to compare those to some of his own home apparel. Home. Home.

Really, his home apparel was a gaping hole where the heart belonged, and strands of blue leaking from the mouth. A limp hoof touched the hole spot, and found slightly pudgy flesh and showered coat instead.

“You’ve been out a long time. And you’ve missed a lot. It’s a bad idea to pile events on you… but that’s what I’m doing, Prince. As you probably know, rulers do rash things sometimes. Including on purpose. Very rash. Suicidal, hm?” the northerner looked at him from his massive height. Blueblood looked right at him, for lack of other alarming things in the room, and even in his prime confusion he saw that this one was… small. Dwarfing the bulkiest pony the Prince had seen, of course, but only by just a bit. A willow of dirty blonde mane hung over exactly half the northerner’s face, and only a single owl-yellow eye looked straight at him - a controlled, slightly perked up glance.

Owl-yellow eyes. Blueblood’s own shrunk upon the memory, and that was answer enough. Not to the right question, but the correct answer.

“You even remember. How much?”

“All of it,” said the pony blandly, mouth having gone very, very dry.

“Good.” The northerner’s - the Jarl’s, as he was apparently titled - eye blinked. When it opened again, it was much sterner, and, with sharp, inequine motions, he turned away from the Prince and to a barred, shuttered window. “You’re dead and you’ll be working with me.”

“What?..”

“I said we had no time, so I’m cutting to the chase. I am Jarl Varsel of the Frozen North Sattelite Provinces, about a month ago you went and killed yourself, unleashed King Sombra onto Equestria, Equestria now has the Crystal Empire back, King Sombra is dead, and we’re working together now.”

“...”

“Trust me, I know it’s a lot to take in, but you have no time. I’d prefer if you knew why you’re getting sudden impulses to do thing A or thing B, you see. And you’ll be doing them. Not much. But you will be.”

“Are… you… what… no.”

“I’m afraid yes. Prince Blueblood… you are… in your southern terms… a zombie. They’re going to pass you off as a living, breathing pony, and that nothing went wrong, and they will ab-so-lute-ly tell you that you did not turn an army of very angry wraiths on Pierce Heaven and Equestria with it, or that you preach nihilism now, but that is all… the case.” Varsel rubbed his oddly long, thin forelegs together like a mantis. A soft metal clunking was heard. Blueblood just stared. He was about thirty seconds behind on the information intake, and sincerely wished he could just leave the loop overall. Past tense? All of that in past tense? And oh how much more was there to think…

“You… I’m not working with anyone, no,” the stallion on the bed shook his head and waved one of his forehooves. “No, no, no. No. I am not anything, not with anyone, not anywhere, not for any reason. No. Enough, no. Take me back. I’ve unfinished business with them all. Yeah, take me back. Thanks.”

The Jarl spun around on his thick hind legs, and stared right at the Prince. In a way not too unfamiliar, Blueblood’s body and that which it contained were pierced.

“Then maybe I will.”

A faint motion of the odd forelegs and a wispy crackle around the wings came in, before Blueblood realized that nothing was there anymore. Nothing. His eyes saw nothing, nothing but a freezing blue abyss. His eyes became redundant, his body felt naught but dismissing cold. But his ears, they worked. They heard the wailing of the wind. And not only. Then, his vision was back, and it was over.

He required no explanation, fortunately for the Jarl.

“This is the only place you’ll be going now, Prince, and if we’re having problems, I’ll have to take you there. At any moment. And yes. If I have to, I can see straight into you - as a matter of fact, I monitor all your actions. Please don’t waste either of our time by scrounging around trying to rid yourself of me. You won’t. You gave yourself to the Frozen North, Blueblood.”

Varsel stomped over to him, and bent himself over the pony. The willow of his mane hung a little bit down, barely enough for the other eye to blink through. It was blank.

“And I rule the Frozen North.”

“Where is my army,” asked the Prince, his head planted firmly on the pillow.

“Well… I do suppose that I could make a better first impression as your very direct superior. I’d say employer, but I won’t pretend you get much more out of this than your… “life”. Sad to say, but I don’t have as much pull in your part of the realm. Hence why I even bothered arranging all this mess with the “marvel of medicine”. Gah. You know the vital details, and I do have about a minute to spare, so why not?” With an odd smile, the Jarl shrugged, his massive wings fluttering a little in the air. Blueblood’s snout scrunched up under the familiar wail of the frozen wasteland. “You’re the biggest help I’ve ever had from these idiots from down under and below.”

Still comprehending the line of events and their current state, the pony just listened.

“You had an army, that you did. So many of them, oh-hooo! Not the entire spectral population, no, but quite a few. You have no idea how much of a problem these are.” Varsel got himself down to the groun, standing awkwardly in what should have been a normal quadrupedal stance. He shrugged and flexed as he spoke, and the crackle of bone and creak of metal was very audible. Nevertheless, he countinued, though groaning. “Traffic is a mess, trade is inconsistent, routes close, routes open, you send someone to deal with them, and then they die and add to the problem… You Equestrians won’t know what a pest is until you get a ghost infestation. Or… I suppose, until someone whom you’ve barely wronged infests you with them over ten centuries ago, but I digress.”

He turned his head toward the pony, having said that, and gave him a single vehement glare, which was gone the next sentence. He then suddenly spoke with a slight emotive timbre to himself, bouncing up a little as he walked on all four, his forelegs now even more stilt-like and rigid.

“For once, someone, something - you, Prince Blueblood, you - you clumped the damned things together. And then led them straight at all the fortified bastions in the area. I won’t be disrespectful, they had a tough time. They were made to repel more, well, direct and corporeal attacks, there wasn’t quite so much pest extermination equipment. I know the dragons and the centaur caused a mess - and be glad, by the way, that I’m only pulling seventy percent of the restoration and compensation costs out of your pockets .”

A series of damp, wet, crackling noises emitted from outside the hospital room and caused the Jarl to grimace. He turned his head back, looking out the window in the tall door, and mumbled something under his breath. With a sigh, the northerner - or, well, The Northerner, it would seem - looked back through Blueblood. His odd eye lit up and his wide mouth strung upwards.

“Now that all’s done, though… you have no idea how much clearer the roads are now! I look outside my hold, and there are at most five wandering ghosts out there by the walls! I used to have up to fifty before, mind you. So… really - thanks. You’re not amazing, no, I won’t pretend you’re anything more than a miserable pile of pony, if even that. But you remind me why I keep my kin away from conflict with you.”

“Pest… control. Pest. Control. Pest… I… Am I awake?..” The Prince raised a weak hoof. It fell back down, limp like the rest of his body.

“Blueblood… Let me get one thing as straight with you as I can while we have the time. Doubt you’ll digest it quickly - you still haven’t - but I’ll make sure you do, eventually. You are… not very good. At absolutely anything. The compass on your flank is the other way around, as last I checked. I don’t know if anyone ever told you that.” The Jarl stuck one of his forelegs into the stallion’s flank, which required him to take a step back and stretch the long limb. “But these things tend to have a point. You’ll never succeed at anything you try to do. You’ll never have what you want the way you want it. You… are a pony. This is how you work. Anything you try, you will fail. On top of being an insane, sheltered idiot, you were never going to do anything. It is only how vapid your ambitions are which matters. And I’m taking control of them now.”

There was an incredibly awkward silence for ten seconds or so. Blueblood stifled a nervous laugh or twelve, but that was the extent of it. The fact that his purpose in life had been sorted as pest control and that he was now taking orders, at “home”, from a yellow-eyed oversized two-faced bastard with a long hanging mane… It would need later comprehending. For the moment, that bastard looked side to side, and out the door, slightly creaked open. The unicorn’s eyes followed, but caught only a quick shadow out there.

“I guess I underestimated the ruckus. Some more time then. This’ll save us another unpleasant conversation through courier, I suppose…” Varsel sighed and chewed on a lip. His teeth were regular, Blueblood noticed. As regular as nearly thrice the size of a pony’s was. “I know it was her, of course it was her. You know who I mean. You saw what happened. Tell me in detail. I had eyes on it all, of course, but it was too late by then, and all too chaotic. Tell me. What happened. To HER.”

“Screw you, Varsel.”

Another thump and a crackle had Blueblood coughing and shaking when his life was given back to him again.

“Call me Scar, I think. Everyone I talk to does that, and I guess we’ll be talking some. Now, again.”

“She…” the Prince sighed. “I saw her… weapons… tear into her head. She screamed something in your language. I honestly can’t recall. I had far, far greater things on my mind.” Within, he added: “And I still do.”

“Think what you will.” A threatening eye pierced him. “Her face. How much of it.”

“How is…”

“We’re very durable, she’s even more so, now tell me how much of her damn face, and where EXACTLY, did her cursed axes chomp in. Now. Time is not a luxury, remember that for the future, Prince.”

“Her… scalp. Scalp and eyes. Not the snout. But that is where vital organs are, so… Maybe that problem is dealt with. Half her head has to be gone, I don’t think—”

“No, no you don’t,” Scar cut him off, and turned around back to the window. His stilt-like forelegs touched the window frame with a clunky clatter. “You ffgh… Perfect. Great. Loving this damned week.” The Jarl sunk a stilted foreleg into the floor, causing a loud thud. “Nevermind. Not your problem. Just… hm.”

“You know, I hear them when you take me there,” Blueblood spoke in the same plain tone he had been using ever since the nonsensical nature of his existence took a turn for the worse. That elicited no reaction. When the Jarl spoke, it was to continue where he himself left off:

“I need to leave, they’re coming to congratulate you on being a marvel of their medical mastery. Nobody knows you’re a wraith. Nobody checks you on the way out. Nobody cares that you’re the only one they haven’t checked in a decade. Nobody suspects anything. If they do, you know what happens. When home? You sit in place, do whatever debauchery you Equestrians get up to, but when I need you to do something - you do it. Exactly how I tell you. I want to know something, you find out, you tell me back. I want to get a law through, you vote for it. I want Griffon berets to be the rage among old virgins - you pose in one for a magazine cover. Or else you suddenly have a heart attack and have a closed casket funeral. Understood, Prince?”

For only having one eye, Jarl Varsel tore through Blueblood’s defenses about as well as Jarlinda Runa did with her larger two. All too familiarly. Perhaps because Prince Blueblood never had much of those defenses ever since maturity came along, little more than two months ago.

“You know, I’m only a Prince on paper. My bloodline has been pretenders for nearly four hundred years,” the pony recited the fact just to chime in.

“You… what.”

“You haven’t heard? I told her that. You know, I might— No, nevermind, freezing abyss, understood.”

“No… again… what did you call yourself. Say it again.”

“You said you were looking at us back then, somehow. I’ve said it then, so—”

“I was busy at the time, now say. It. AGAIN.”

Blueblood’s fleshy form shook under the guttural growl of the otherwise soft-spoken Jarl. His snout was right in front of the Prince’s, even though that required him to abandon his bipedal position and float in the air as a quadruped.

“I… am a Prince… on paper. A… uhm... “ A nervous smile crept up on Blueblood’s face, its corner jerking. “A paper prince.”

“A paper prince. Oh gods, just how many things did I do wrong in my life.” Scar shrugged, stretching his snout sideways, and rubbing it against the furs he was wearing. Not without some issue, he buried his snout in them completely, and rubbed it there, quietly muttering something. He sounded less than pleased, the stallion could hear as much. Definitely not understand, though.

The pony wondered about a suitable answer for some time. His attention was somewhat taken by a quiet rumble outside the room, and more wet noises with it, but he did offer an empty, hoarse “uhhh” before surrendering. Blueblood really did not have too much to say. Not anymore, at least not at the moment.

“Pardon?..” he tried.

Varsel turned around, no longer looking the Prince’s way. A frustrated, angry grimace was on his snout for a brief moment, until it went out of Blueblood’s vision. The large equine headed for the door, his long, rigid forelegs making loud contact with the floor.

“Nevermind. I told you everything. Now stay down, wait for the good doctors, and pretend to be a marvel of Equestrian medicine that not a soul will hear about. Rub the ponies’ ego, they like it. Meet you again, got to run, bye. Shade, stop fucking around and get the door for me,” the Jarl said all hurriedly, the last sentence not even aimed at Blueblood at all.

He minded little. He lay in his bed, face almost torn open by a massive grin. His eyes bulged again, and this time were definitely dehydrated. He breathed quick, rapid breaths. From nothing, to Nothing, to nothing again. For one last thing, he decided to see what it was that he stared at - a small mirror to his side, evidently for patients to see their new healed selves. And so he saw himself.

Slightly overweight, slightly scarred, missing some hair, some bruises on his face, and a bright blue, shining, liquid-covered compass on his flank.

Commissioner Hoover, Pierce Heaven Police Departmentto Master Secretary Raven Claw, Princess Celestia’s Letters and Filing Department

Urgently requesting interference with the command situation at Frozen North outpost Pierce Heaven. Unsupervised and intermittently unconfirmed changes are bringing morale down at extreme rates, and decisions taken by those now in charge are more than questionable. That is highly detrimental to the external defenses of the Equestrian realm, and direct royal oversight is required to be in order.

For particular information, I have attached a separate, sealed document of suspicious and questionable activities performed by the individuals in question, them being the newly appointed City Enforcer A. Lux and Chief of Internal Affairs M. Buster. Full names attached in sealed document as well. However, for clarity’s sake, my concerns are on the level of major threats to Equestria.

As I write, the former had authorized the uninspected leave of a member of your own royal family, Prince Blueblood, from the city, despite the vastly suspicious nature of his delayed return. Whereas the latter did offer protest, a series of activities of his own do give me cause for suspicion as well. The reasoning for how such an act is inconceivable is also enclosed.

I thank you for the time, and request that this all be forwarded to Princess Celestia herself.

Secretary Inkblot, Princess Celestia’s Letters and Filing Department to Commissioner Hoover, Pierce Heaven Police Department

Your request cannot be processed due to the current absence of Master Secretary Raven Claw. We write to notify that your messages are very important to us and will be processed as soon as the abovementioned issues are fixed. Thank you, and have a good day keeping the peace in your glorious (LOCATION).