Lineage

Once we’d reached the fancy district, Celestia had come up with the plan for us to split up into two teams in order to cover more ground to search for the third key fragment. She and Luna would handle a sector of the city designated to them, while Cadance, Twilight, and myself were tasked with searching another sector, each reporting back to each other at a designated location before heading down another section of the city. With each party taking off, Luna and Celestia taking off at high speed while our group merely sauntered around slightly, Twilight began to inquire about the city.

“So what exactly are we looking for?” she asked as we meandered along a road, the white and gold bricks of the lower city giving this place a much cleaner and fancier appearance than before. “Any clues or hints as to what we’re supposed to notice a key would be in?”

“Usually a big arena,” I answered. “Usually guarded by some big motherfucker with a scary weapon. Remember that these are designed to be fair challenges, not death traps. We’re supposed to win if we have the power to… do… oh fuck.”

“What?” Twilight demanded. “What is it?”

I kept my eyes focussed on the horror before us, several hundred metres away was a black stain on the city’s bright colours. It was the same black ooze that had spewed out of Elisa, but in a much more surplus amount. It lacquered the streets and buildings, seeming to have swallowed both stone and flesh as several of what I presumed to be Highmoore Elves were encased in the black ooze, this particular ooze having hardened into a shell around them. They’d either died from the contact with the ooze, or it had hardened and suffocated them all to death, leaving lifelike statues of men, women, and children fleeing in terror from the ooze they couldn’t outrun.

“Holy fuck,” Twilight exclaimed, eyes widened in terror. “What is that stuff?”

“That’s the same shit that came pouring out of Elisa when we fought,” I answered, all of us hurrying over to the encased corpses. “I figured it was just unique to her… but I guess not.”

“It’s organic,” Cadance said over my shoulder. “I can tell you that much by looking at it.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“It has the same life residue that a corpse does,” Cadance said, walking closer to the hardened sludge. “It’s kinda hard to explain what it feels like unless you’ve been taught to sense it, but when you sense out for life signs, a dead creature feels different from a sword or a brick wall. Those things don’t really have a ‘feeling’ when sensed, but a living being feels like an obstacle you have to push past without really pushing past it, if that makes sense.”

“Uh…” I said, scratching my head. “Not really.”

“I don’t remember how Celestia described it, but it’s a sensation where you can feel presence but not resistance, like you’ve walked into a solid object and feel how solid it is, but you can just walk through it as if it wasn’t there,” Cadance said, giving the description another attempt. “That’s at least what a dead creature feels like. Alive creatures feel warm when you sense them, and the stronger they are, the hotter they feel. Is that better?”

“I guess,” I nodded. “So if it’s organic… is it still alive?”

“No, whatever this is is long dead,” Cadance nodded, looking at the encased corpses with a saddened expression. “They look like they’re still alive.”

“They’re probably nothing but dust inside,” Twilight commented. “That’s assuming it doesn’t assimilate its victims.”

“The question I’m wondering,” I began. “Is what killed it? I know it’s an almost alien creature to us, but how exactly do you get a torrent of black sludge that eats tens of people to die in what seems like seconds?”

“If I had to hazard a guess,” Twilight said, pointing at the ground at our feet and the residue on the corpses. “I’d say something cooked it. Something big.”

“You’re right,” I nodded, looking at the floor and several other pieces of evidence around the area. “Wait… what?”

“What’s wrong?” Cadance asked me. I turned her attention to the size of the burn streak across the ground before pointing at a footprint, or a claw print, that had been turned into a cast by the heat.

“See the issue?” I asked.

“No. Not at all,” Cadance said with a shake of her head.

“The claw print here, judging by the size of it and the placement of the fourth finger, this one lacking a claw, tells me it was an adult, female Coppermaw dragon,” I explained before pointing at the burn streak on the ground. “But the length of that burn tells me there’s no way in hell it could’ve been either an adult, a female, or a Coppermaw.”

“Why?” Cadance asked.

“Three reasons: One, the streak is way too big for the lung size of a Coppermaw, even a fully grown one couldn’t breathe that much and that far in a single breath,” I began.

“How do you know it didn’t do multiple breaths?” Twilight asked.

“Look at the shape of the burn streak,” I said, pointing at the length and width of it. “Multiple breaths would’ve left some abnormality in the direction and length of the stream, being able to see multiple points where the fire flared and came to a halt. It also would’ve needed to move forward to get that distance, and there isn’t any claw marks in the ash, indicting it never moved from the spot it fired from, meaning that it did it all in one.”

“Fair enough,” Twilight nodded.

“Secondly, there’s no way it could’ve been a female, because female Coppermaw’s don’t breathe an element. It’s a male trait only,” I explained. “And the third, and most important, reason: Coppermaw’s can’t breathe fire. They’re Rot dragons without any exceptions.”

“Maybe there were two dragons?” Cadance suggested.

“Not possible,” I said with a shake of my head, standing up and pointing back at the claw print. “The position that foot is in compared to where the stream starts shows me that the dragon that left the footprint was the same one that let loose the fire breath that it shouldn’t have. But there’s another problem that makes this make no sense.”

“Go on?” the girls asked.

“The dragon’s too big,” I answered. “The position that foot is at, the back foot, is well over thirty feet away from the start of the burn mark. Coppermaw’s are one of the smallest species of dragon there is, often argued with zoologists to be classified as a Drake due to its lack of size. They grow to be twenty feet from nose to tail tip with no recorded Coppermaw in history ever exceeding twenty four feet long.”

“So… we’re dealing with a dragon too big for its species that’s too good at breathing an element it shouldn’t have because of its species and gender?” Cadance asked.

“Not to mention the fact that we’ve completely ignored the issue of what a dragon is doing here in the first place,” I said. “And… hang on a minute… Svea was here looking for treasure and has now fucked off.”

“So?” Twilight asked.

“She’s completely forgotten about the entire reason she came here,” I elaborated. “Actually… I don’t even know what the hell she came here for in the first place.”

“Why are you bringing this up now?” Cadance asked.

“Because I’d completely forgotten about it until now,” I answered. “Why did she stop looking for whatever she came here for?”

“Maybe the child you gave her was worth more than the treasure?” Cadance suggested. “Dragons are like that sometimes.”

“But she would’ve said something about that, right?” I asked.

“Not important right now, we can discuss it later,” Cadance said. “Dragon that shouldn’t exist in here. Figure it out. Now.”

“I have a good way of figuring it out,” Twilight spoke up.

“Which is?” we asked her.

“Follow the trail?” she asked with a smirk.

And so we did.

We wandered down the rather large trail of ooze, it cracking and breaking under our boots, as I spotted at least three different types of dragon claws from three different species including the Coppermaw, this only adding to the confusion. There was a silent wondering before Cadance spoke up about something that seemed to be bugging her.

“What are the chances the Highmoore had the same reproductive system we do?” she asked.

“Why would you ask that?” Twilight asked.

“Because they seem to have nearly everything else identical to us,” Cadance said, stopping and gesturing to several of the ooze-covered corpses. “Faces, fingers, toes, breasts, near everything identical to both humans and Alicorn. Hell, even a lot of the monsters in this world heavily resemble humans.”

“Well we do have the theory that the Highmoore were created by intelligent design,” Twilight suggested.

“Yes, by a race of super-beings that happened to create them to look nearly identical to Dark Elves, Snow Elves, and Imperial Elves that inhabit other places in this world despite those other races of Elves having no similar beliefs to the Highmoore, with the Snow Elves believing that an ancient Ice Wolf impregnated the Earth and birthed them all from the snowy mountaintops.”

“What the fuck?”

“Religion, remember? They’ve all got their strange creation stories,” Cadance waved off before continuing. “And several other cultures have their own religions with their own deities, some even mimicking each other as time has gone on, despite the fact at least three of these deities have been proven to exist: Amaterasu, Osiris, and Freyja, each having their own creation stories despite the three of them not being the same. How does that work?”

“Different families of gods could be the answer,” Twilight chimed in with her ‘Intelligence stance’, the pose she made where she closed her eyes, cocked her hips, and held one upturned palm up by her chin as she spoke in a know-it-all-voice. “One theory that holds water with a large number of philosophers nowadays is the belief that each pantheon of deities creates a successor group to their reign in a new location before retiring from their position as caretaker of the world, some being completely different, as with Ra possible giving succession to Helios once growing tired of his position, or other gods creating their successors in their likeness with Hera creating Juno. The difference in culture and their creation stories can come from the New Gods not truly understanding their birth and merely remembering the ways they were created.”

“That’s a good idea there, Twilight,” Cadance nodded. “But who makes a wolf fuck a mountain?”

“I don’t claim to have the answer to everything,” Twilight shrugged. “And there are some fucking weirdos out there, y’know?”

“Ladies?” I asked. “Dragon that shouldn’t be here?”

“Alright, alright,” they sighed, heading back onto the route we were walking.

“But that is a good point you made there,” Cadance brought up. “Different gods create ‘different’ races, but they follow the same design that their predecessors used with minor tweaks… though that does make me wonder where angels, demons, and monsters came from.”

“Not all Gods were good, remember?” Twilight pointed out. “Some of them could’ve created the lesser beings to torment humans. Though that makes me wonder where in our timeline angels and demons became free creatures, with demons becoming obsessed with sex and lust while angels became the so-called ‘Guardians of the Light’.”

“You said that with a lot of disgust,” I said, looking over my shoulders.

“Because the angels aren’t Guardians, they’re enforcers,” Twilight growled. “They wish to see the world cleaned, purified, of all darkness and disease. That means all those who commit sin, are born genetically misshapen, or are mentally handicapped to be executed to prevent the pollution of the gene pool.”

“Seriously?” I asked in horror.

“Seriously. They want to purge all wrong-doers and dark creatures from the earth through violence and systematic genocide. Purge the impure and let the strong and righteous reign over everything.”

“Then why haven’t they?” I asked.

“Because we’re here to stop them,” Cadance jumped in. “There’ve been as many altercations in the past between Alicorn and Angel as there have been Alicorn and Demons.”

“So why haven’t they just ganged up on us and taken over?” I asked. “Surely an entire race of pure-bred warriors could overwhelm four and a half Alicorn?”

“Hey,” Twilight said in a hurt manner.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Remember the seal on the Demons?” Cadance asked.

“Yeah?”

“There’s the exact same one placed on the Angels that prevents them from leaving their domain,” Cadance continued. “Now that was originally set up as the first line of defense back when there were thousands of Alicorn in the world… but now it’s the wooden door holding back the storm. If it breaks, we all die.”

“That’s… a happy thought,” I chuckled nervously.

“Don’t worry yourself,” she said, patting me on the shoulder. “Only an Alicorn can remove the seal. So as long as none of us go traitor, they’re not getting out anytime soon. Though that’s not to say that there aren’t both Angels and Demons roaming around on this plane from times before the mass sealing. They keep hidden, but are still here.”

“That makes me wonder something,” I said, getting a flashback to a question I’d wanted to ask for years. “If a Demon can easily be slain by Holy power, can Sinner’s energy do the same thing to Angels?”

“Yup. But the Angels have it much harder to keep their purity than Demons do,” Cadance nodded. “After all, it’s easier to be remorselessly evil than it is to be self-sarcificingly good. If a Demon gets exposed to Holy power, it’ll burn their power away and leave them a shell of their former self. If an Angel is exposed to Sinner’s energy, it’ll cause their wings to crack and shatter, their angelic power and status being revoked as soon as their wings break.”

“Can they get them back?” I asked.

“Nope,” Cadance answered. “They’re gone for good. And the Angel is usually so distraught with their loss that they lose their will to carry on, anyway.”

“What happens to them?” I asked.

“Well, since most Angels lose their wings in fights with Demons, they’re usually captured by the Demons and forced into sex slavery to their master, be it man or woman,” Cadance said. “By nature, most demons are bisexual.”

“I’m not,” I pointed out.

“How do you know that?” Twilight asked.

“Because I’ve fucked a guy and didn’t enjoy the experience?” I suggested.

“What?” Twilight squealed, recoiling in horror. “Who?”

“Grael,” I shrugged. “It was a long time ago when both of us were kinda bi-curious. I found out that I’m completely straight man while he’s a confident bisexual wolf.”

“Everyone’s gotta learn sometime,” Cadance shrugged. “I’m surprised you can admit that so easily. A lot of men wouldn’t.”

“Because for some reason a lot of men seem to be ashamed of the fact they might be gay,” I shrugged. “Which isn’t something to be ashamed of at all. But anyway, back to the topic at hand? Demons and Angels with Angelic sex slaves?”

“Guys…”

“Right. It happens to a lot of Angels when defeated, and they are often forced to pleasure and entertain the demon that defeated them,” Cadance continued.

“Guys.”

“The Angel usually resists for the first few months, but after having their spirit broken and their resolve destroyed, they usually tend to give in and just play along to get it over with,” Cadance went on. “There’s only one woman I know that’s ever been able to break free of Demonic slavery, and that’s your grandmother.”

“Guys!” Twilight bellowed, grabbing us both by the neck, turning us around, and pointing at the monstrosity sitting in the arena we’d walked into without noticing.

“What the fuck is that?” Cadance demanded.

“The answer to why the dragon didn’t make any sense,” I growled, wrenching my sword from my sheath. “Boost me!”

Twilight did as instructed as I stared at the horrendous creature that only earned the title of ‘dragon’ through technicality. It was a hulking monstrosity around thirty feet tall created entirely from stitched-together pieces of other dragons, visibly sections of rotting flesh, badly-connected body parts, and pieces that were too small or too large to function properly on the position they’d been fastened to. The creature reared its ugly head, its bottom jaw far too large for the rest of its head as the even-larger tongue hung out of a rot-hole in the bottom of its jaw, flailing around and dripping more and more black ooze onto the floor.

It flared its rotten wings, pieces of skin flying off as it did so, while the sound of its broken bones cracking and crunching made me feel uneasy. It’s mismatched eyes, one half missing, focussed on us with hatred, the intelligence of a dragon missing from this pile-of-parts-beast as it stepped forward on an extremely muscular arm, only to follow it up with a rotted, ooze-dripping stump that had been cut down to fit the creature’s disgusting torso.

“What the fuck is this thing!?” Cadance demanded, drawing her sword and powering up a magical spell in her hand.

“I have no idea…” I answered, needing to clamp my hands over my ears to prevent being deafened by an ear-piercing scream from its shredded vocal cords. “Elisa mentioned a horrible monster… but she was just talking about the God they tried to make.”

“Shot in the dark here,” Twilight said, powering up her staff and preparing several glowing, purple crystal fragments to fire at the beast. “Maybe this was their first attempt to make a god?”

“And the people outside-” I began.

“Were killed by this thing,” Cadance finished. “Right, Twilight; Richter and I will get close to this thing, you keep us stocked with shields, spells, and whatever else you can think of to keep us from getting killed. If it looks like it’s about to charge up some monster attacks, pull us out of their with a teleport spell and throw up a shield if you can.”

“Right,” Twilight nodded.

“But if you need time to rest or recover, take it,” Cadance added on. “I don’t want you killing yourself here over this stupid thing, understand?”

“Sure thing, sis,” Twilight winked. “Go get it.”

“Ready, Richter?” Cadance asked me.

“Born ready, Ma,” I grinned, gripping my sword tightly and nodding. “I’ll try to aim for the stitch-work, try to take off some of its limbs.”

“Great,” she nodded. “Break!”

The two of us rushed towards the enormous creature, seeing its rotten-in-half tail curl behind it as it leaped forward, trying to squish both of us before we could attack it. We threw ourselves away from the impact, the creature spraying the black ooze, what seemed to be its blood, everywhere as it landed, coating both myself and Cadance while Twilight protected herself with a shield.

“This stuff seems really gross,” the little Alicorn commented.

“Eh, I’ve been covered in worse,” Cadance shrugged, channeling her magic into her sword and unleashing a bright pink sword beam, the attack slicing deep into the beast’s flesh and causing more black blood to spew everywhere. It seemed to have severed a nerve too, as when the dragon attempted to push itself up with that arm, it was unresponsive, causing it to fall down hard onto it’s side again.

“Go for it’s head!” Twilight shouted, charging up a powerful energy bolt and firing it into the dragon’s head, piercing straight through it’s skull and causing it to roar in agony. “Remember the curse on this place will keep it alive! We need to dismember it completely.”

The dragon raised its head upwards, looking directly at Twilight as it spewed black, fizzing ooze at her. She brought up another shield and retorted with another bolt of lightning, the bolt frying the inside of the creature’s mouth and causing its muscle to seize violently. Twilight lashed a hand out to the side, using her magic on a set of large pillars on either side of the arena, raising them up into the air and bringing them down on top of the dragon, shattering its already-fragile bones as well as pinning it down.

“Take care of its head!” she yelled out to us. Cadance moved slightly faster than I did, unleashing a beyond-humanly fast barrage of magically-enhanced strikes that allowed her to walk through the dragon’s neck as she cut it to pieces, covering herself in the black ooze, before coming out on the other side of the now-severed head, throwing herself high up into the air with magic, and firing a powerful blast of plasma down at the creature head, it’s screams of agony soon silencing as the head was vaporised by the plasma attack.

Cadance landed on the ground lightly, wiping the black ooze off her face as she sheathed her sword on her hip, casually watching the dragon’s body struggle and kick violently, seeing rotten pieces of the beast fling across the arena with more bones breaking loudly. I walked up behind her and hugged her tightly, ignoring the transfer of ooze from her to me.

“I cannot imagine how hard I would’ve failed if you guys weren’t here,” I grinned.

“That’s why you never do anything without Momma’s supervision,” she chuckled, kissing me briefly before turning around to look at Twilight. “You alright?”

“Yeah,” Twilight nodded, dropping her bubble shield and walking over to us. “I expected that to take longer.”

“Not with the condition that thing was in,” Cadance answered, giving her sister an appreciative kiss on the lips before continuing. “In its prime, maybe. But that thing’s thirty five thousand years past its breaking point and wasn’t going to pose much of a threat to the three of us.”

“Fair enough,” Twilight nodded. “Should we go back to Luna and Celestia now?”

“Eh, we can hang around here a while longer,” Cadance said, holding out her hand and using some kind of magic to attract the key from inside the dragon’s gullet. “I figure we can find a nice, empty house and have some good old-fashioned victory sex. You guys in for that?”

“I would enjoy that,” Twilight nodded. “But we can’t be too long.”

“Ugh, fine,” Cadance sighed. “Victory foreplay then. So… shall we be off?”