Chapter I: Omens and Beauties
"Novices! All of them! All damned three of them. Petty pride! Arrogance! Jealousy! Damn! Damn! DAMN! Jackasses... Jackasses! JACKASSES!" Tenebrous, in the form of a Mammoth Jack donkey, screams to the heavens... indoors.
"Sir, quit acting," his lieutenant, a gray unicorn; of impressive, but not excessive, build; says.
"Sorry. Just have to pretend to be angry, sometimes. It is quite fun to do that. Plans are flexible. Those three were thorns. They were pruned. I can adjust. Lost liabilities have now streamlined any operations I may run. Their loss can actually help me. There is always a silver lining to every outcome, Crastas. Sometimes, it is even Rhodium. Live a few millenia more and this you shall learn," Tenebrous says, immediately shifting to a unicorn form, and with it, his vocal tonality from mock-anger to transcendent tranquility.
"Sir, you have been saying that to me for years. Furthermore, it is in your guidebook you give out the day a recruit signs up," Crastas deadpans. This elicits a chuckle from Tenebrous.
"So very true, Crastas. That is why you are my lieutenant, lest life be boring without your acerbic wit."
"Sir, I learned from the best in that department," Crastas says, as a colt would say to his sire.
"True, Crastas. True," Tenebrous says, wrapping his foreleg around Crastas. "Don't forget this, though: You are the closest thing I have to a son of my own," Tenebrous says. "Let us scry upon something of interest."
Fluttershy and Rarity are on their weekly spa trip. It has been a number of years since their circle of friends first, truly, assembled, but, since that time, they have only grown closer.
Friends forever, one could call the six. Friends.... forever...
Fluttershy and Rarity are easily the closest. Grace and Beauty... kindness and generosity... easy compliments, they are. They have shared much adventure and much fun. Trials, too, have been shared and overcome or tolerated. The two beauties at this spa have shared them as friends. Best friends.
"Funny, Fluttershy," says the Beauty.
"What is funny, Rarity?" says the Grace.
"How long has it been since something bad happened?" the Beauty asks.
"Um... I think... two days since... Pinkie Pie launched Rainbow Dash... out of that cannon," the Grace responds. The rainbow-maned mare hit a brick wall. Poor pegasus is still in the hospital.
"That isn't what I meant. I mean really bad," the Beauty says.
"Two weeks. Pinkie Pie... um... set fire to Snowflake's house. The big guy was..." her friend says, getting shier as she recalls,"not happy. I got Iron Will to sort it out." By sort it out, she means that the two of them had a foreleg-arm wrestling match.
"Bigger."
"Pinkie Pie nearly destroying Appleoosa while riding that Manticore, two months ago?" Fluttershy asks, this time without timidity, for some odd reason. She probably is the one who had prevented any carnage, horse-drawn carriage, horse, horse-drawn horse-drawn carriage or otherwise. She has stopped a raging manticore before, so it stands to reason that she would be the one to do it again. Why Pinkie Pie was screaming "EVIL!" like an mad old stallion and cracking her voice once or twice while doing so, nopony can possibly fathom. Pinkie Pie is like this all the time. After the Rainbow Dash incident, however, she is trying to hold back her antics for a bit. The rationale being that she needs to start working on her friend's "I'm so glad you are out of the Hospital" party, plus its after-party party, and its after-after-party-party party. Perhaps, this line of thinking will turn out for the best, but it probably will not culminate into anything substantial or, at the very most, sane, for reasons Pinkie Pie cannot possibly contemplate but everypony else can. She is probably playing some annoying song on the glass armonica as this is being dictated. Scratch that statement. She is doing exactly that. How her playing is at all audible and how she could plausibly play such an obscure instrument defy all possible logic, reasoning, and rules of how long paragraphs are intended to be. For the sake of sanity, please, proceed to ignore her. That means now. Starting... right now. Nopony is listening, are they. They are just singing and dancing along with whatever song she is playing on that instrument that few people know even exists. Well, great. That is just fantastic... attentions back to the Beauty, please, everypony. Eyes and ears off the Pinkie pie playing the glass armonica. Please redirect all attentions towards the Rarity in the spa. Near-naked. Oh... wait. She is almost always naked. Well, look at her, anyway! Not like that, perverts. Actually, fine... if that gets your attentions, then stare at her that way.
"Not that either... aw... forget it," the Beauty says.
"I hear Cadance and Shining Armor are expecting. Um... I was even asked to be a midwife," Fluttershy says, blushing.
"That's terrific! We have to throw her a baby shower!" the Beauty says. For the love of Celestia, Luna, and all that exists, has existed, and will exist, such as sanity, do not let Pinkie Pie plan the baby shower!
"Oh my! How exciting," the Grace says. "We should get Pinkie Pie to plan it." Nuts.
"It is hard to imagine that it has been four years since they got married. In that time, Rainbow Dash adopted Scootaloo, Little Pip has become quite the mare's stallion, Granny Smith has taken up rocking-chair or hunched-over-a-walker comedy, Iron Will and Snowflake have their own action series, Rainbow Dash is now a Wonderbolt, and, generally, good things are just easy to happen for us, now. But, I just feel this strange unease... as if somepony is behind everything going on. Good and Bad. It is just weird," the Beauty says.
"Rarity...um... with us... weird is... um... normal. Are you trying to avoid talking about something," the Grace says, shyly.
The Beauty responds, "No...um... not at all... a little bit... Okay, I had a little bit too much of Applejack's cider yesterday, and woke up in Twilight's house. Spike had carried me home. He's grown up a bit. He's an early teen, now. He's such a sweet gentlecolt."
"Do you like him... that is, if you don't mind me asking?" the Grace asks.
"I have not really put any thought to that. I'm not currently looking for or interested in love, especially after the incident with Prince Spineless. I certainly would not mind it being spike, but he's a bit young right now. For now, he must stay a friend. But I cannot speak for the future. He will be of an appropriate age in a few years, so... who knows? I will not try to predict the future. For now, I remain happily single. The future is interesting because it is unpredictable," the Beauty says, having thoroughly failed some sort of test here. "Have you ever given thought to your love-life, Fluttershy?"
"No...Not really. I am always too busy. I never have time to think about it. Is that weird?" she says, blushing redder than Big Macintosh eating a tomato and a Red Delicious apple in short succession for whatever weird reason he could possibly have for such an action.
"No, that's normal, and there is nothing wrong with that. If you find love, then, great. Good for you, and I will wish you the very best with whomever you end up with. If no, then you are not tied down by commitment. Either way, you win," the Beauty asserts.
"Thanks, Rarity. You're such a good friend," the Grace says, leaning upon the Beauty and hugging her tightly... or at least as tight as she can... which is not precisely definable as a tight hug.
"Thanks. You are too, Fluttershy. Come. I do believe we should be going. I need to design a flight suit for a pegasus."
"Alright. I need to go home and feed Angel Bunny."
The scrying pauses. Crastas is intrigued.
"That was quite enlightening, sir. Tell me, why did you run two scrying spheres at once?"
"I shall explain in a bit. The second revealed a trouble brewing, and you are stalling my intervention."
Crastas resumes scrying as Tenebrous disappears. "This is an unusual case, it seems. Tenebrous is not normally like this."
The beauty and the grace get up, walk out of the spa, say their good-byes, and walk in the directions of their respective homes.
As Fluttershy gets close to her house, she is knocked in the back of the head. The offending bludgeon, a now-bloodied brick, lands next to her, and she follows it. She is barely conscious, as she lies upon the ground with a bleeding head, as a unicorn stallion(who is unworthy of having either of those words describing him); with the smile of a monster, eyes not even belying his depravity, and an arrogant gait that suggests heavily his pettiness; walks up to her with an oviously heinous, vile intent. He moves behind her slowly, and is preparing to do something quite unsavory. Fluttershy has felt unbridled fear in her life, but in each of the other cases, she was either with friends or able to make some sort of difference. No, this level of fear makes those fears feel like hopes. A grayish mist appears ... seeping quickly out of the ground. From it forms a unicorn stallion who's coat and mane are of a mixing and un-mixing of greys, whites, and blacks, with smatterings of every other color and shade in sometimes within, but hard to spot, as his color shifts and moves, mixing and unmixing.
"Stop your depravity at once, brutish cretin," the being says in a tenor belying his obvious ability.
"What makes you think I would?" the fool says inching closer to his prey.
The unicorn's voice shifts to a far more serious baritone to say, "I can destroy you where you stand, without even moving. If I decide to move, you are ever the more damned. And you decide to taunt me? Have you no savvy, or simply no care?"
"I call your bluff. What could you possibly do to me?" the smug boob says, standing up feet behind Fluttershy. Perhaps the answer to the unicorn's question is... both? A mysterious stranger appears from absolutely nowhere, has an ever-varying appearance and a shifting voice... yeah... probably both.
The unicorn shifts into an alicorn, not of Celestia size, but bigger- of draft horse size. His voice becomes a deep bass that would make the late great Horson Welles at the end of his career sound like a schoolfilly to say, "So shall you ask, so shall you know."
The asinine plodding fool freezes up, and doubles over being Fluttershy. His who body writhers in pure unbridled agony. Every possible sort and type of physical, mental, and emotional pain wracks his body(though he only feels them, as the alicorn is not actually performing such acts), wreaking torturous havoc with his mind and nerves at seemingly maximum intensity, yet in a crescendo ad molto. Each form of pain begets the other two in a seemingly never-ending, ever-begetting, cycle of increasing pain. He cannot scream. The idea that one can be knocked unconscious from pain is a myth, but he oh-so-desperately wishes for it to be true. The tormenting onslaught of suffering is, however, overstraining his nerves and mind. One-by-one, each nerve cell, in an increasing pace, dies. His heart is pounding so desperately and rampantly that it is ripping the capillaries. The fool collapses, dead from unimaginable torure, unable to scream, and no soul left to damn, after one minute that feels eternal to him.
"So you had asked, so you now know," he says in his baritone, shaking his head. The method, he knows, was highly inefficient, and a bad choice. Plus, it only works on those of sufficient sin for which they do not care to atone for.
He goes up to the barely conscious pegasus whom he saved from a horrid fate. She is bleeding out of a smaller wound than he initially assumed. Looks like the maniac did not wish to prey upon a dead body.
He shudders at the implication - there have been other victims.
The alicorn nudges her with his head and whispers, "Worry not, he has been stopped. Everything will be alright."
Fluttershy, who has not seen what has gone on, mouths two words, then loses consciousness.
