Prior Note: I decided to give Raze the first part of this chapter, just because I felt I was ignoring him a little too much *shrug*.

Chapter 18: Wise Words and First Confrontations

Pre-read/edited by: Edragon

“Applejack, you seem unsure of something,” a deep voice like thunder rumbled.

Despite its volume and depth, however, Applejack barely even noticed she’d heard it as her eyes watched Thane’s monstrous form disappear over the Everfree.

Her young mind, as the old saying went, was currently a million miles away; at that particular moment in time, it was watching over a memory that lay buried in the very back of her mind, one which was now some thirteen years passed, a memory which to say was ‘unpleasant’ would’ve been the understatement of the millennia: the death of her parents.

She didn’t exactly know how the sight before her had led her mind to drag up that particular memory, but it had, and in doing so had brought with it all the long forgotten or suppressed pain. She remembered it all too well really, as if it had only happened the day before, one doesn’t exactly forget the day their parents leave forever; the feelings of sorrow and despair tearing her up inside, her heart feeling as if it were nothing but a void, and a single word constantly rebounding inside her head that made her gut clench.

Goodbye.

To say such a word was an everyday occurrence; from one friend to another, it was a simple acknowledgment that they’d have to be apart for a while before seeing each other again, something which the amber mare herself had probably said a couple times a day since she could talk. But the goodbye she’d just said to Lucian, Thane, and Silver-Fang… it was as painful as those final goodbyes she’d said to her parents, those painful words escaping her lips as eyes watched their coffins be lowered, just as they had moments earlier as Thane disappear into the skyline.

Nearly every other time she’d said goodbye, Applejack knew she’d see her friends again, but this time she knew there was no such guarantee, nor would there be in the near future; if what Lucian was saying was true, then an all-out war was possibly on the horizon, a war that could very much turn a common goodbye to a friend into a final one.

That knowledge alone hurt as much as any buck to the side.

“Applejack?” the voice rumbled again, this time finally shattering her gloomy thoughts.

Applejack shook her head as her thoughts at last receded, and upon doing so found the massive form of Raze standing directly over her, what she guessed to be concern splayed across his face.

Taking a quick look around the groves of nearby trees, and finding a lack of anypony else either sitting or standing amongst her apple orchard, the mare guessed that her friends had since departed her family’s property to go on with their own lives… just how long had she been staring at the sky anyway?

“Are you alright?” he asked, the lycan’s tone matching his face. “I’ve been trying to get your attention for a while...”

“Heh… sorry,” she mumbled, gingerly scraping a front hoof across the dirt, and doing her best to avoid making eye contact. “Guess ah’ just… zoned out there for a moment.”

Raze snorted in disagreement. “With all due respect, I know you’re lying; you looked as if you were standing face to face with William Corvinus just then.”

Applejack cringed and bit her lower lip as the words stung her ears, subsequently prompting them both to flatten back; being the element of honesty always did have that particular drawback.

With a quick final glance around the apple tree bordered clearing, just to make doubly sure nopony would unnecessarily hear their conversation and thus jump to conclusions, the farm-pony sighed and virtually slumped back on her haunches in the dirt.

“How’d ya do it so easily?” she asked after a long moment of silence, the hoof which had previously scraping at the earth now reaching up, and carefully removing her Stetson. “Ya just stood there and let Lucian, you’re oldest and best friend as far as I can see it… run off with that crazy plan ah’ his without even liftin’ a hoof to try and stop him. For all you and I know he could be dead by sundown.”

The massive lycan just tilted his head and raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t seem to doubt his plan earlier,” Raze replied bluntly, his words though only managing to earn him an unimpressed glare.

“Don’t you try and muddy the issue, alright? That ain’t the darn point I’m gettin’ at and you know it!”

A long sigh escaped Applejack’s lips as her breathing slowed, and she eventually calmed down to a state of level-headedness again, though by ‘calmed down’, one could probably argue that ‘suppressing her anger’ would more accurately describe Applejack’s composure; if someone were to be judging by face value, she still looked about ready to nail the first thing that moved with her back legs.

“I just… I just don’t get it… how ya can just stand there like nothing’s wrong?” she went on, her eyes falling to meet the ground beneath her hooves, and her voice dying to a mere whisper, as a wave of confusion and dread washed over her. “He could die, Raze.”

The entire world seemed to stop and go quiet as the last few words left her muzzle, and it actually seemed to stop rather suddenly, as if an order of silence had been put forth by Celestia herself; the easterly wind suddenly seemed to vanish, the gentle rustling of the apple tree leaves abruptly stopped with it, and the songs of the birds that inhabited said trees all ceased; it was as if the word ‘die’ was a poison to all the world that heard it.

Whether or not Applejack simply imagined it, she couldn’t tell; but it seemed real enough to her.

And then Raze’s mouth, in an act that caught Applejack totally off guard, and ending up prompting her eyebrow to twitch in annoyance, suddenly broke into a smile that would make Pinkie Pie burst into song.

“Applejack, you and I both know what Lucian is doing is dangerous; we both know what the beasts of the Everfree are like, we both heard what Silver-Fang said about his alpha, and we both know Lucian’s plan can potentially end badly… but why should either you or I stop him from trying to go through with it?”

“H-huh?”

Perhaps she was imagining things again, but the amber pony swore the ground shook a little as Raze’s mountainous form sat down opposite her with a soft thud, the lycan using the thick surface roots of his former leaning-tree as a seat, while his massive back found it’s resting place against the truck; if not for the fact she’d seen them take one of Lucian’s shoulder charges, Applejack figured she’d be waiting for the trunk to bend and snap under Raze’s immense weight.

“Let me ask you something,” Raze rumbled as he at last got comfortable, the lycan reaching up and placing the palms of his hands behind his head. “Why do you think Lucian is willing to do this?”

“Cause he thinks he can just go and win over those dogs’ alpha?” Applejack replied with a roll of her green eyes, her words dripping with unamused sarcasm.

Raze just chuckled at her obviously agitated words, the action quickly earning him a snort and glare from the farm pony, and forcing said farm pony’s blood pressure to subsequently rise another few notches; his laughter pretty much ended in an instant, but his smirk stubbornly remained despite Applejack’s wish otherwise, forcing the mare to grind her back teeth to avoid doing something hot-headed and irrational.

“No, in my opinion, he probably doubts Silver-Fang’s alpha just as much as you and I do; he did this because he believes in doing the right thing, and hence because he believes seeking out the diamond dogs is the right thing to do.”

“He’s putting himself in danger here! Calling that ‘the right thing to do’ doesn’t make a darn lick ah’ sense!” Applejack snorted in disbelief, unable to resist face-hoofing at Raze’s ludicrous statement. “Ugh! I just don’t get you lycans!”

All the while, she was still trying to resist the urge to buck the amused, yet-to-disappear smirk off of the dark lycan’s face.

“Ya’ll keep saying Lucian’s willing to chance getting himself killed… because he thinks it’s the darn right thing to do? Well what about everypony who doesn’t want to see him die then huh? What about you or Princess Luna? Didn’t he ever stop to consider the rest of us when he came up with this featherbrained scheme ah’ his?”

“Put these words in your mind, Applejack: Don’t shed a tear for a man who died fighting for what he believed in, but weep for a man who died but fought for nothing.” The lycan replied simply.

It was at those words that Applejack froze.

Inwardly, that kind of logic just didn’t sit right with the earth pony, no matter how many ways somepony could put it; if any one of her friends were going to attempt something anywhere near this dangerous, whether it be Rainbow Dash, Twilight, or, Celestia forbid that day, Rarity, then at the very least she’d attempt to talk some sense into their apparently empty skulls.

And yet… she’d personally done some of those types of dangerous things before, on more than one occasion; the big one that immediately sprang to mind was when she and her friends had basically charged into the Everfree, ironically of all places, in search of the elements of harmony. Looking back, it had been an utterly crazy idea to begin with, and given the likes of what Nightmare Moon had thrown at them, Applejack found herself silently amazed they’d all lived to wield their elements.

“But…if ah’ had to… I’d do it all over again,” she thought to herself, the mare’s gaze drifting to the rustling leaves above her and Raze as her mind reminisced.

“Lucian and I have lost countless friends to over the years, Applejack,” Raze went on in a slightly more level tone, apparently content to simply ignore her sudden bought of silence. “But neither he nor I have ever once shed tears for them. Why is that so you ask, because they all died fighting for something they believed in, something which both Lucian and I believed in. A better future for the lycans, and a world free of vampires like Viktor. Now… that time has since passed, but as it is we all, you, Lucian, and myself included, stand at the beginning of a new conflict… so I want you to ask yourself this question now rather than later, should I try and hold onto my life for the good of a few? Or, if the need were to arise, should I be willing to give it up for the good of many?”

For a split second, Applejack chewed her lip as if she was thinking over the question, but in truth it was hard for her heart not to already know the answer.

“If it came to it… if it meant protecting ma’ friends and family… I’d be willing to give my life for Equestria.”

Raze smiled proudly and nodded. “Now you understand how Lucian and I think, and why our friend has done what he has,” The lycan grinned, reaching over and offering the deflated farm pony a scratch behind the ears, which she gladly accepted with a bowed head. “Don’t go worrying yourself about Lucian, he’s faced far worse and lived through it.”

With that, the earth seemed to rumble once again as Raze got to his feet, the massive lycan giving off a smile that frankly unnerved Applejack as he loudly cracked his knuckles.

“Now then, as Lucian’s lieutenant I should probably be making myself useful, and seeing as I already know you can use your mouth to grasp farm tools, would you show me where you keep your axes?”

Applejack swore her eyebrow rose the length of her forehead. “Uh… why?” she asked, taking a tentative and nervous step backwards at the word ‘axes’.

If she hadn’t already been unnerved by the dark lycan’s menacing grin, then she was as it promptly doubled in width. “There is a war coming, and with all respect your back legs will only get you so far in a real battle… so I’m going to teach you how to fight vampires like a lycan.”

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The Everfree forest.

It was, to put it quite simply, an utter anomaly to Lucian, something he figured he would never be able to truly come to terms with.

As far as the lycan had come to understand, most of ponykind believed it was nothing but a vile, evil, and unnatural place, one to be feared and avoided at all possible cost if you were even slightly sane; to them, it appeared to be a place where the most twisted and deranged fiends, that would otherwise only ever be found in a pony’s worst nightmares, would manifest into a physical reality, and then seek out the flesh and blood of anypony foolish enough to wander unprepared into the forest’s darkness. Although he’d never voice it openly, Lucian had to admit that some of that wariness was slowly seeping into even his toughened mind, with the memory of his and Luna’s encounter with the changelings only adding to that distrust.

So it was somewhat understandable, in the former lycan leader’s opinion anyway, that he found himself confused by how at home he felt in its deathly embrace.

“Then again, it’s probably the closest thing to my home Equestria has to offer,” he thought as he looked down across the dark green expanse, the words leaving a bittersweet taste in his mouth.

That, he knew all too well, was a very true assumption, almost scarily so in fact; with a little creative imagination, Lucian could very much see packs of William’s savage spawn making their dens amongst the mountains and shadowy depths of the Everfree, just as they had done in the harsh wilds of the Hungarian forests during his own youth; from there, the wolves would no doubt silently wait in the unrelenting darkness until nightfall, before emerging to prey on any unsuspecting creature that had wandered too far into the trees, just as the Timberwolves did.

Then there were the remains of Luna and Celestia’s former home, the very thought of which brought the taste of bile to his tongue. Just like the fortress of the vampire council that Lucian had once called his home, those ruins had stood against the wrath of time like an ever mocking reminder, but just like Viktor’s own keep, only to a select few; the few who had been unlucky enough to have shaped it’s unsavoury past.

For Luna, as she herself had said, it was as painful to look at as any physical scar.

“SILVER-FANG! If you jab me with that Tartarus damned thing one more time…”

“If you would just fly straight then I wouldn’t have to jab you! Every time you twist and turn I feel as if I’m going to lose my stomach; do you really want my lunch covering your precious scales?”

Lucian couldn’t help but groan as his thoughts were shattered like glass, and his eyes were finally pulled away from the vast expanse of the Everfree; what they met, however, wasn’t really much better.

The diamond dog’s words, if Thane’s agitated expression was anything to go by, seemed to have had only annoyed the dragon further, and had now prompted puffs of angry grey smoke to escape his already flaring nostrils; said puffs of smoke, coupled with a set of sword-sized fangs being drawn simultaneously, was giving the impression that Thane was very close to viciously reducing something, or somedog, to a pile of ashes.

All the while, the metallic point of Silver-Fang’s spear, the apparent cause of Thane’s sourly bad mood, continued to hover precariously over his green scaled hide, with the canine wielding it looking more than ready to use it again.

And it was between this set of ‘a rock and a hard place’ that Lucian found himself sitting.

If it were anywhere else, Lucian figured he could’ve just groaned, ignored the quarrelling dragon and canine pair, and walked away… but right now he couldn’t walk anywhere. The fact of the matter, quite frankly, was that he was presently stuck a mile or so above the expanse of dark green that was the Everfree forest, on the back of said dragon as they hurtled past sky scraping mountains and through the low lying clouds, with said canine seated directly behind him.

“Do you even know how boring it is to fly in a straight line? For hours on end? No, of course you wouldn’t, because you don’t have wings, and you also happen to be the one sitting on my back, so how about you just shut up and deal with it! Or do you want me to put this stupid harness on you and see if you can carry me?”

“Well forgive my kind for not being born with wings!” Silver-Fang snarled, throwing his paws up in exasperation. “Bah! Why by the first bitch do I get stuck with an overgrown lizard like you?”

“Overgrown lizard?! Call me that again you sorry excuse for a rug, I dare you!”

“Can you two kindly not try to kill each other for once?”

What followed Lucian’s sudden input was a moment of silence, during which both the diamond dog and dragon fell silent, and, embarrassingly enough, both of them still with their mouths freely open; it seemed that with their quarrelling, both far younger males had somehow forgotten about the lycan’s presence, and upon looking back at him had discovered him glaring at them, with his arms folded and a clearly displeased expression across his face.

As every lycan who’d ever served under his command had learned, the likes of Taylor and Pierce better than most, you didn’t want Lucian annoyed with you.

At that realization, Silver-Fang grudgingly but quickly lowered the point of his spear, and returned the weapon to its prior resting place at his side. Thane, in turn, after giving the grey diamond dog a final venomous show of his lethal fangs, let out a final growl before turning away and returning to flying, the sounds of his guttural snarls being replaced with the heavy beats of his massive wings; neither, however, did so much as acknowledge each other.

Lucian just groaned and rubbed his brow as he relaxed again. “I swear I’ll never understand either of you.”

“Tch, I swear I should’ve eaten him when I had the damn chance,” Thane muttered sourly in return. “He’s an even bigger pain in the tail then Titan is… hey Lucian, could you do me a favour and throw his furry backside off?”

“Oh please do!” Silver-Fang growled deeply. “I’m sure you flying up to my kind’s tunnels will go sooo well without me.”

“I’d sure as hay eat well,” Thane hissed.

“Bah! You’d be full of manticore spears in, oh, what’s that line your pony bitch says? Ten seconds flat!”

A very sudden, very loud, very angry, and very justified snarl echoed throughout the sky as Thane’s head suddenly lashed around with lightning speed, the blood-chilling look that covered the dragon’s face, complete with rows of drawn pearly fangs, lacking any trace of his usual playfulness as it hovered inches from both lycan’s faces.

“If you dare say another word about Dash, I WILL TEAR YOU APART AND THEN THROW YOU OFF ONE PIECE AT A TIME!”

Thane’s last few words came out pretty close to being a thunderous roar, and with each one being said his teeth got closer and closer to both Lucian and Silver-Fang’s faces; by the last word, barely a hair’s breadth stood between them and the polished white wall of glinting, dripping natural swords.

If Applejack was around, Lucian knew she’d confirm Thane hadn’t been making an empty promise.

“If I may ask…” Lucian started after a tense moment, his back still arched away from Thane as he cast his blue eyes between his two companions. “What are manticore spears?”

In truth, he didn’t really care that much about what the mystery weapons were, all he was hoping to do was to somehow diffuse the hostile, and thanks to Thane sulphurous, air that he was literally stuck right in the middle of, or, at very least, change the toxic subject.

Although he doubted Thane would do anything rash at their altitude, Lucian couldn’t help but grip the rope harness’s reigns a little tighter as the already agitated green dragon snarled again, the lycan’s heart likely beating faster than it ever had done before.

The problem was that Thane wasn’t a horse, so pulling at the reigns would probably only anger him further.

“They’re the main reason us dragons haven’t been able to eradicate the diamond dogs over the years.” Thane grunted as his head slowly returned to facing forward, and his fury apparently died down, the dragon’s vast wings now tilted to guide them slightly more southward around another natural stone giant. “Remember back at AJ’s farm when I said ‘I’m not looking forward to getting my hide filled with spears’? Case in point. Manticores are the diamond dogs’ primary anti-dragon weapon, and are a total and utter pain in the tail to deal with, and I mean that literally.”

Silver-Fang nodded in agreement. “They’re mounted spear throwers,” the diamond dog put in, an edge of a canine growl coming through in his words. “The best description I can give you is that they’re similar in design to the crossbows that the griffins use… you do know what a crossbow is, right?”

Lucian wordlessly nodded as he re-adjusted his own sitting position, though Thane’s scales made getting comfortable virtually impossible. Given that he’d grown up in Viktor’s colossal fortress, and learned how to operate the massive ballistae that lined its main wall, the guessed he already had a very good mental idea of what these supposed weapons looked like; if they were in anyway similar, then the kind of damage they were capable of doing would be lethal to just about anything.

More than a few werewolves, and even some of his lycans, had been unlucky enough to have discovered that the hard way.

“Well… manticores are basically very large crossbows… they’re made for fighting off dragons when groups of them try and raid our tunnels. The spears themselves are about twice as heavy as mine; each manticore is built to fire two spears at a time, and we make the spears with carved diamonds for heads, that way they can punch through even the toughest dragon scale if need be.”

“And you wonder why we don’t like you?” Thane’s voice ended on a sour note. “Uh, Lucian, can we stop for a while? My wings are starting to hu-What the hay?!”

If either one of the lycans on his back had been able to wonder what the possible cause of Thane’s problem was, the single available second provided no chance to voice said confusion; before the words ‘what the hay’ had even fully left Thane’s jaws, the dragon’s vast wings, at a speed that would seem to defy the established laws of physics, withdrew from the air and slammed closed against his side.

In a heartbeat, the lack of propulsion sent his massive body into a diagonal sharp dive, and onto a collision path with the dense forest below.

For a moment, Lucian’s gut clenched as he struggled to grip the makeshift reigns, the thought of Thane having finally broken down under his anger and snapped rapidly bombarding the front of his mind; but then the dragon did something totally unexpected. Without any sort of warning, Thane’s draconic jaws suddenly tore open, and he unleashed a downward torrent of blistering flames…

… Straight into an ascending swarm of shrieking changelings.

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“You just had to go and bloody roar!”

“Tartarus dammit! Just shut up for once you annoying furball!” Thane snarled in reply, swinging his head back and bathing another section of the pursuing swarm in dragon fire. “You two should probably get a hold of something, LIKE NOW!”

“I would but my hands are full!” Lucian thought through his own fury, angrily and brutally tearing the membrane wing off the thrashing changeling he was holding, before hurling the shrieking black bug-creature back into the sky.

He watched it plummet with a satisfied growl.

The lycan’s spot of freedom though was relatively short lived, for just as the changeling he’d maimed disappeared screaming from sight, three more of the buzzing creatures came flying in a little too close for comfort; all three attacked from different directions, forcing Lucian to try and hold on to the makeshift reigns with one furry paw while slashing out wildly with the other, all the while doing his best to avoid getting kicked or hit with green magic pulses.

“Well… given we’re still in the sun, at least I can be say they’re not vampiric,” he thought, snatching one that got too close from the air, and then squeezing down on its neck until he heard a sickening crack.

The formerly blue sky that covered the Everfree had now become something of a battle ground, with a deadly game of cat and mouse being played by the combatants amongst the clouds. The black mass of changelings followed them no matter which way Thane flew, no matter how close he cut by the sides of mountains, and no matter how he dived or curved with his wings, it seemed he couldn’t get away from them without risking throwing the two lycan’s off, hence there had only been one option left.

Fight their way out with whatever they had.

All the while trying not to fall from the green dragon’s back, Lucian used his lycan paws to slash and tear at any changeling that got within striking range, his canine claws leaving deep bloody furrows in whatever piece of chitin they met. Silver-Fang, on the other paw, struck by accurately lancing and jabbing out with his spear, his years of honed skill apparently enabling him to skewer the creatures on the metal point with relative ease.

They were quickly discovering one major problem; they were basically in the middle of an entire swarm. It seemed no matter how many the two lycan’s killed, and no matter how many dozens Thane reduced to smouldering piles of goo and ash, swatted from the air with his tail, or crushed between his talons, the changeling numbers never seemed to dwindle in the slightest.

“You know, this is getting old really quickly,” Thane’s voice growled over the resounding hum of their pursuers wings.

His words were accompanied by something that sounded like a terrified squeal, a loud snap, a sickening crunch that made Lucian shiver, and finally a gag as Thane presumably spat something vile out. “Bleh! These things taste even worse than they look!”

Doing his best not to roll his eyes in frustration, Lucian snorted and returned to slashing out, all the while regretting leaving the swords he’d found in the ruins of Luna’s former home.

“Any chance you can just… fly faster than them?” Silver-Fang asked through his own gritted teeth, the diamond dog presently trying his best to hold the reigns, while simultaneously shaking the limp corpse of a changeling from his spear’s end. “The tunnel gates shouldn’t be too far from here.”

Using his still changeling-ended spear as a pointer, the diamond dog quickly gestured towards to the towering structure of an ever nearing mountain, one which rose from the Everfree forest on its own, and stood out slightly taller and wider on the range than its surrounding brethren; with a squint of his dark eyes, Lucian swore he could vaguely distinguish a dirt road that wound upwards through the dense tree cover that covered the brown stone monolith, and ended in what looked to be a cluster of towers and embattlements perched just below the mountain’s snow topped peak.

“The entrance keep up there will have manticores and guard dogs all over it, so we should be able to land while they cover our tails; I don’t know about you two, but I’m a much better fighter with both of my paws firmly on the ground… think you can blitz that distance scaly?”

Thane went quiet for a moment as he tilted his wings forward, abruptly dropped another few feet below the main body of the swarm, and then flared them fully open again. By now, Lucian figured they’d lost about half of their initial altitude whilst trying to outmanoeuvre the insect-pony cloud; they were so close to the ground now he could make out the top branches of the individual trees below.

“I can out fly these freaks.” The dragon answered with an uneasy glance over his shoulder. “But trust me; you’ll want to hold on tight for this.”

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Author's Note

Notes:

Call it a spoiler if you want, but next chapter will be entirely a battle chapter. (*rubs palms* as Kenpachi Zaraki would say “This’ll be fun!”)

Edragon: A whole battle chapter! *Squee!*