Lineage

The ancient vault door lit up a bright blue, trails of energy flowing through the grooves and etchings on the surface like water through a lake, the bright illumination revealing an image depicting what I assumed was the Highmoore Royal Crest: A bird-like creature I didn’t recognise abreast a kite shield with two stars on the wings of the bird.

“Huh,” Luna commented. “A Viederhawk. Haven’t seen one of those for a while.”

“What are they?” Twilight asked. “I’ve never seen one before.

“They’re a species of hawk that went extinct a long time ago,” Luna explained. “Despite their intimidating size, they were basically nothing more than glorified seagulls, much like the Bald Eagle.”

“What killed them off?” I asked.

“A mix of time and bad evolution,” Luna continued. “They couldn’t adapt to the shift in their environments, changing temperatures, and better predators either hunting them or their food.”

“Why didn’t you save them all?” Twilight asked. “You guys do that for endangered species, right?”

“I can’t fuck a bird, Twilight,” Luna said in a blank manner.

“Focus, please,” Celestia sighed, guiding us all into the chamber before the door closed and sealed behind us. “We have a job to do.”

“Just had a bad thought,” Cadance said. “What if she’s working with Ifrit? Or what if there isn’t even an Ifrit?”

“Go on,” Celestia said.

“Well, what if she’s the one behind the entire thing and is just lying to make us walk into a trap so she can kill or imprison us?” Cadance asked.

“I have had experience with that recently,” I spoke up. “Before I picked a side with one of the vampire clans and knocked up their leader, the other vampire lied through her teeth to try and get me to side with her despite wanting to use me for the exact same reason the other did.”

“...”

“...”

“...”

“What?” Luna asked in a stern tone.

“I’ll tell you later,” I waved off. “But the point still stands: What if we’ve just been fucked over?”

“Then we kill whatever’s in here, then go back out and kill Illvana, too,” Celestia shrugged. “I believe we’re over-complicating things here.”

“What if we can’t get out?” Cadance asked. “Because this is a trap?”

“There’s always a way out when you’re a demi-god-esque creature, sweetie,” Celestia said, patting her daughter on the head. “Now can we all just get back on topic a-”

“Move!” both Luna and I bellowed, grabbing our nearest family members and throwing ourselves to the ground as our super-hearing picked up a crackle of energy, managing to barely avoid being vaporised by a beam of lightning.

“Shields up!” Celestia said. “Cadance and Luna, with me. Twilight and Richter, you two stay back and stay safe!”

“I’m not gonna be much use back here!” I growled.

“I’d rather you be useless than dead, honey!” Cadance snapped in response. “Twilight, keep him alive!”

“Right,” the short Alicorn nodded, grabbing me by the collar and throwing up a shield around both of us whilst keeping her eyes peeled for whatever it was that had fired at us. “I hope this thing isn’t too dangerous…”

Dangerous?

Not sure.

Ugly?

Ohmyyes.

The second we laid eyes on the abomination against life that crawled and scratched towards us we were shocked to the core. The monster was a white mass of a material I couldn’t begin to find a comparison for, looking like the sickly combination of afterbirth and rotting flesh, tearing and stretching as it moved forwards. It crawled forwards on a mass of ooze-tentacles that seemed to tear out from its underside, gored flesh and torn muscles both visibly and audibly scraping across the cold stone of the inner vault.

The creature seemed to have eyes, but they were ruptured and malformed, dried blood caking what I guessed were sockets above a mouth that seemed unable to function, being a slit across ‘face’ that garbled sounds fell from, a tongue sliced into several strips hanging through a hole in the ‘jaw’ of the beast. It had no comparison to any animal in shape of movement, being the true definition of abomination and grotesque.

The black ooze poured non-stop from orifices, the liquid giving the creature an even slimier appearance than normal, as it coated and lathered itself in the ooze with its tentacles, moaning and screaming loudly as it raised its ‘head’ upwards, charging another energy bolt before firing it directly at Twilight and I. Twilight stood strong for a moment, but the second the beam hit the barrier it shattered it into a thousand pieces, rocketing her backwards and into the stone wall.

She slammed her head into the wall on impact, leaving a sizeable blood stain on the wall as she did so, before dropping to the cold floor. I rushed over to her in a panic, barely managing to see Luna and Celestia fire a set of twin beams at the creature, hearing its garbled screaming echo through the chamber as I skidded down next to my aunt, checking her neck for both damages and a pulse.

The result came with good and bad news: The good news was that she was still alive while the bad news being that her neck was broken. I breathed a sigh of relief that the break wasn’t an upper-neck fracture and that her brain stem was still connected to her spine, or else she would’ve suffocated to death in minutes. Though the bad news came piling back on as I realised that she was out for good, most likely paralysed from the neck down for now, in too bad a condition to move, and I had no idea what damage had been done to the brain itself.

I needed to find some way to get us to cover, but there was no way to move her without risking further damage. And to make matters worse, the ooze started forming into humanoid shapes, sharpening their limbs into rigid weapons, and hobbling over to me. I drew my sword, though not sure why, as if my knowledge of slime-based monsters told me anything, they’d mostly likely reform before my sword even left their body, not to mention the risk of these things covering me and suffocating me.

The other three Alicorn were clearly trying to reach me, but were walled in by an army of these ooze-creatures, dodging magic blasts, and avoiding tentacles. There was no chance of them getting over here fast enough, so I needed to fend for myself any way I could. I tired a stupid move, holding my hand out and trying to use the magic boost Twilight had given me to try and throw some kind of magic blast at the Oozes, only to have the mental feeling of running straight into a brick wall.

“Alright, plan B then,” I said, standing as close to Twilight as I could and squaring my stance, waiting for the Oozes to attack. One threw a stumbling swing, allowing me to block the strike on the flat of my blade and then shove it backwards before slashing straight through it, cleaving through with no resistance. As I’d expected, the creature reformed itself with a warped glooping sound before swinging again. They were too slow on their own to do any damage, but multiple ones of them soon became a problem, especially with the fact that I had to stay rooted in one place to protect Twilight instead of being able to move.

I heard Cadance call out to me, seeing her in the back of my vision rush towards me only to be snared by a tentacle and flung across the vault. She slammed into the wall hard enough to shatter the brickwork and be embedded several feet deep, but the impact seemed to do nothing more than irritate her. I turned my attention back to the Ooze only to have a hammer-shaped hand slam straight into my head, knocking me aside and onto my front. I rolled as quickly as possible, seeing another one of them raise their spiked-club hand for a killing blow on Twilight.

In a moment of pure desperation, I threw my sword at him, slicing through the arm that formed into his weapon, but to no avail. It reformed immediately, getting his attention on the now-weaponless idiotic teenager that stood in front of him: me. I stood up as best as I could, my face stinging and bleeding from the impact, only to be awarded with a slash to my back from another Ooze, armour and flesh rending as blood spilled onto the floor. Another impact came by a brutal swing from the hammer-hand, smashing ribs and bringing me to my knees, hacking blood up onto the floor as he brought the hammer down onto the back of my head.

“Richter!”

I was down once again, now having the Oozes abandon their weapons and begin to cling to me, covering my form in their thick forms, my attempts to tear them from myself in vain, merely spreading the tar-like substance onto my fingers and my hands. The panic I felt as the cold fluid clung to me was punctured by anger. Anger at myself, anger at my lack of power, and anger at my lack of ability to do anything.

I’d failed once again. Failed to stand up, failed to protect, and failed to overcome. Faced with a challenge that an Alicorn child should’ve been able to easily ascend above and failing not only hurt my pride…

It infuriated me.

Anger beyond belief, building stronger and stronger as the weight and size of my failures and inadequacies clung to and swallowed me even more than the Ooze, the blackness now absorbing my entire being as I caught the last glimpse of my family, struggling to reach me, seeing the tears welling up in my mother’s eyes as she was unable to help her child.

Her failure.

My failure.

It was now that the feelings of loss, regret, and defeat were replaced with a primal, burning rage. Rage that shook something loose in my head, rage that built up a force in my body and my lungs that I had no way of controlling. Mentally snapping beyond rationality as the burning hate of myself, failure, and defeat soared beyond any level I’d felt before. I was swallowed by the Ooze and swallowed by my anger, not listening to the advice of calmness and rationality I’d been taught by my mother and family, but listening to the screams of anger brought on by the side I’d ignored for so long.

I felt a barrier in my mind, in my soul, shatter loudly, opening my mouth and roaring. I unleashed both a primal scream and a scream of energy as a bright blue aura erupted around me, frying the Ooze where it clung to me and granting me strength beyond anything I’d ever experienced before, feeding my hatred with the self-doubt, regret, fear, and sense of failure that I’d been branded with time and time again.

And as I fed the fire, it fed me with strength.

My lungs seemed limitless, the scream of fury drowned out only by the scream of my charging aura. The whole world seemed to shake, the ground cracking at my feet as sparks of lightning and magic danced around my being, the whole battle seeming to come to a standstill as a wind from nowhere swept up, my eyes lit up a bright blue, and strength unimaginable fuelled my body and aimed it at the creature that had hurt my family.

Overwhelmed by a rush of power, fury, and instinct, I attempted another magic attack, my hands guided by a memory that was not mine as I jutted my hands out in front of me, wrists resting on one another, fingers curled, and palms outstretched before ripping them down by my right side, listening to the feeling I had that told me to do no more than funnel the energy, imagine the power I possessed now in the palm of my hand.

As a second ticked by, a burning-hot ball of plasma formed in the palms of my hand, gritting my teeth as I funnelled everything I had into it, the ball growing to be the size of a watermelon before I knew it was enough. I gritted my teeth, stepped forward, and thrusted my palms out again, firing the blast that contained everything I had directly at the abomination, at Ifrit, the beam being accompanied by my roar of anger. For a split second, the beam seemed to do nothing as it made contact with the creature’s head. For a split second, I feared I’d failed.

And then a split second later: It was all over.

The beam of plasma tore through the creature’s head, burning its flesh and causing it to scream out in agony as I aimed the beam downwards, cutting through the creature like a hot knife through soft butter, frying the ooze and organs the creature had tucked inside its disgustingness before the two, fired pieces fell to either side, Ifrit being dead before hitting the ground.

As soon as I cut off the beam, I felt the barrier lock that power away again, felt it seal itself behind the wall that had been there my entire life, the wall preventing me from becoming what I was meant to be. But now the barrier was cracked, damaged.

It was weak.

I’d had a taste of the power inside me. A taste of a power strong enough to destroy a monster that was supposed to be on the level of a god. I suddenly felt weak, light-headed, barely able to stand. I staggered around for a brief moment, drained of all energy, before collapsing in a heap next to Twilight, making out the forms of my family sprinting towards me, shouting words I couldn’t make out as I drifted off into the nothingness of sleep.

I awoke what felt like an eternity later, my body still heavy, still weak, and my mouth dry and foul-tasting. I opened my eyes to see that I was in my bed in my room in Equestria, with Grael asleep at the foot of the large bed, and my mother asleep in a chair next to the bed. She looked messy and unkempt. As if she hadn’t showered for a long time. I shifted in bed, Grael waking up instantly and padding his way up to the top of the bed, looking down at me.

“You’re awake,” he said in his deep, gravelly voice. “That’s good to see. How do you feel?”

“Awful,” I growled out. “What happened?”

“You passed out after killing Ifrit,” Grael answered simply. “Mother and everyone else brought you back here and kept a close eye on you to make sure you didn’t blow the Academy up in your sleep. Mother refused to leave your side and has been sitting here waiting for you to wake up ever since you were brought back.”

“How… how long was I out for?” I asked.

“A week,” Grael said. “You were at death’s door when brought back to the Academy. After stabilising enough, you were brought back home, to Equestria. We’ve been waiting for you to wake up ever since.”

“How’s Twilight?” I asked, sitting up straight. “Is she okay?”

“Celestia was able to heal her of her broken neck,” Grael nodded. “She’s going to be out of commission for a while, Celestia is refusing to let her so much as hold a magic staff, but she’s going to be fine. We’re more concerned with you, though.”

“The magic thing, right?” I asked.

“Yes, the ‘magic thin’,” Grael said with a roll of his eyes. “The ‘magic thing’ that was able to incinerate a demi-god with a single shot.”

“Wait, Ifrit is a demi-god now?” I asked. “I thought she was an actual god?”

“Not quite, something to do with her official power classification plus misinformation lead you guys to believe she was a god, but after an official study was launched on her remains, she was confirmed to be a demi-god,” Grael answered. “So you don’t get the title of God Slayer yet. Although you do win an award for being a magical anomaly.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“After you popped your magic cherry, it resealed itself,” Grael said.

“That unusual?” I said with a cocked eyebrow.

“Try impossible,” Grael responded. “That’s never happened before in recorded history, not with any Alicorn, human, Elf, or whatever uses magic. It simply doesn’t reseal itself afterwards.”

“So why did it with me?” I asked.

“We have no idea,” Grael shrugged. “Celestia, Luna, and the entire Equestrian Scholar’s College has been working around the clock to determine a reason for an Alicorn’s magic resealing itself, and so far, they’ve got two theories.”

“Care to share?”

“The first one is that you subconsciously sealed it away yourself, which isn’t very likely due to the lack of control over magic people have during their first use; barely enough to light a torch, nevermind mentally reseal a dam,” Grael explained.

“But I was able to fire a plasma beam with enough strength to kill a demi-god?” I asked. “How does that work?”

“They’ve pinned that down to environmental assistance,” Grael said. “The reason you were that strong is because you managed to tap into the high amount of magical energy in the vault. Although Celestia was able to determine that your unaltered, basic-level magical strength puts you at a level three times stronger than Cadance, who, until now, was the third strongest Alicorn in existence, not to mention being a succubus that has had over forty years of sex-strengthening to her name.”

“So that means…” I said.

“That means that your magical skill outranks your family’s natural base by three times more,” Grael answered.

“Natural base?” I asked.

“Let me explain: Each Alicorn in a specific tier has a level of strength that they all share. Luna and Celestia are over a hundred times stronger than Cadance because they’ve had five thousand years to train and grow stronger, but they still started at the same strength she did,” Grael began. “But you have a natural base power level that exceeds your family’s by three times the amount, putting you in a tier alongside Alicorn that were so powerful they were able to conquer this world and several others in their lifetime.”

“Because of Arregaithel’s genes,” I said quietly. “He’s the reason I’m this strong.”

“It seems so,” Grael nodded. “I think that’s something to be proud of… as long as you don’t use that power to explore a darker path.”

“I wasn’t considering it,” I said, turning to look at my mother who had briefly stirred in her sleep. “Mom?”

She shook her head for a second, needing me to call her name two or three more times before she woke fully, looking at me with a confused expression before realising what she was seeing. She immediately threw herself out of the chair she sat in and tackled me onto my back, knocking poor Grael sideways off the bed and onto the floor with a confused yelp, very unfitting of his powerful appearance.

My mother locked lips with me, both of us ignoring the disgusting taste of the other’s mouth, as she embraced me lovingly, nearly sobbing as she did so.

“You’re awake!” she exclaimed loudly. “Good-fucking-gods, I thought you’d never wake up! How are you feeling? Are you hungry? Thirsty? Does anything hurt? Anything feel not right in your head?”

“I’m fine, Mom,” I chuckled. “I think I slept off whatever happened to me back in Winter’s Maw.”

“Good,” she nodded. “Now we both need to be showered, dressed, and see your Grandmother to have her explained everything.”

“Can I have a minute to compose my-” I began, only to be dragged away to the shower by my very erratic, anxious mother.