Vampiolence

Epilogue: Vinyl

Tiptoe lived up to her name. She liked to think she was the quietest pony who ever played hide and seek, though Bluebell from Class 2B was renowned champion of the playground. Still, she reckoned not even Bluebell could have snuck out of her tent without waking any of her tent-mates, which had to count more than just winning games of hide and seek, right?

Outside the air hummed with the sound of cicadas. Tiptoe paused to make sure nopony was awake to see her scurry across the meadow towards the toilet tent. It was one thing to need the bathroom in the middle of the night because of scary stories. It was another to be caught and called a baby for the remainder of the trip.

She used the tent and re-emerged with a sigh and a shiver. There was a nip in the air. Her mummy would have said she needed a scarf. Maybe, just this once, mummy was right. Tiptoe picked her way back towards her tent, hoping she could get back inside and snuggle into her sleeping bag before anypony realised she had been gone. Filly Scout rules said she was supposed to have woken her tent leader and be escorted to the bathroom, but that was far too humiliating a prospect.

However, when the strange pony stepped into her path, she kind of wished Charmer was by her side. Charmer was a unicorn and nothing seemed to scare her. Sometimes there is nothing more frightening than to be a tiny earth pony without no-one else around to remind you that you have no wings or magic.

She squeaked. Surely there hadn’t been anypony else there a second ago. She had checked! And this pony wasn’t a Filly Scout leader, either. Tiptoe had never seen her before in her life. She cowered down in the grass.

The pony was tall. Moonlight turned it into a genderless silhouette, but when it spoke, the voice was unmistakably female.

“Are you Tiptoe Bilberry?”

Tiptoe cowered even lower, then stopped. No, she should act more like Charmer. Nothing scared Charmer. “Wh-who wants to know?”

“Are you?”

She stuck out her bottom lip. “I can’t tell you. You’re a stranger. A-and if you don’t leave – right now – I’m going to scream and wake up everypony because strangers aren’t allowed in our campsite. We rented this field. It’s ours until next Thursday.”

“I can feel the blood-bond,” the stranger said cryptically, ignoring Tiptoe’s threat. “Yes … you’re definitely who I’ve come for.”

“Come for?” Tiptoe repeated, less certainly than before. She took a step back and opened her mouth to scream.

Before she could, hooves clamped over her mouth. She stared with wide, terrified eyes into the face of the bigger pony. How in Celestia’s name had she moved so fast?

“I’m sorry, kid. I know this isn’t your fault.”

Tiptoe tried to struggle as the mare carried her away, but she was held too tight and they moved so fast. In what seemed like only a few heartbeats, they were out of the field with barely a bump as they the mare opened the gate in the fence and left it wide.

“Then again,” the mare said in that same flat tone, “It wasn’t my fault either. It wasn’t any of our faults. This is just the way things have to be. For what it’s worth, I am sorry, kid. Tiptoe,” she corrected herself. “I’ll remember your name. I always remember the names. It’s the least I can do.”

Tiptoe tried to cry out as the pony drew her back and then hurled her into the air as easily as if she was throwing a baseball. She sailed over the edge of the quarry that neighboured the campsite. All the Filly Scouts had been told on the very first day not to leave the field and definitely not to wander too close to the edge. That was why they were supposed to leave the tents in pairs at night.

As she fell, she saw the mare poised on the edge, forelegs still outstretched. Her whole body was highlighted in the moonlight, her fur as white as Tiptoe’s own but her eyes as red as poppies.

And then Tiptoe hit the rocks at the bottom and knew no more.

Vinyl stared down at the tiny broken body. It didn’t get any easier. She turned away, the image burned into her mind. So many dead children. So many left who needed to die.

She could feel them. It was faint unless she concentrated, but she could feel them, their minds nebulous presences dotted around Equestria. She couldn’t pinpoint towns or houses unless she was much closer, but if she concentrated she could pick directions and just keep walking until their minds coalesced into something more substantial.

Voron’s last gift. Or maybe this was the same with all vampires. She was the head of this bloodline now. It made a twisted kind of sense that his ability to sense his children would pass to her, his eldest, now he was gone.

It made wiping all trace of him from the world that much easier.

She couldn’t take the risk. Every single one of the foals Voron and Vellum had made was a threat to Equestria. Every single one had the potential to become a vampire, or at the very least to pass on the vampire gene. She couldn’t allow that. Voron’s plans could not be allowed to come to fruition.

It was her only reason for carrying on now. The spellbook that she might have used to tamp down her vampirism again had burned up in the practise room two years ago. Her life in the sun had burned up with it. Not that she wanted that life if it didn’t have Octavia in it. She needed a reason to have survived. She needed everything she had suffered and lost to not have been for nothing.

And so she followed the minds she could feel. She travelled as far as she needed to and did what needed to be done. and gradually, the number of minds she could feel had grown smaller. With every life she snuffed out, the number grew smaller still. When she could feel no more at all, only then would she allow herself to rest. Only then would her life have had some meaning.

A thin band of light skimmed the horizon. Soon the Filly Scout campsite would wake. Soon they would realise Tiptoe was gone. They would look for her, find the open gate, and discover her body at the bottom of the quarry. An accident, they would say. A tragic, terrible accident that could have been prevented if only she had woken her tent leader when she got up in the night.

Vinyl was well practised in making crime scenes look like anything but what they were.

“Not yet,” she whispered to the soon-to-rise sun. She sprinted away, too fast for mortal eyes to see. “I still have work to do.”

When all her father’s offspring were gone, then … then she could rest.

“I’ll see you then, Tavi. Wait for me, love.”

Fin.