Dead by Midnight

Aria

The problem with having someone as brilliant as Sunset leading our ragtag band of half-human miscreants is the fact that she’s both pessimistic in the extreme and, unfortunately, usually correct.

When I’d first met Sunset, I’d still been the immortal bitch I’d always been for the past thousand years or so. Before that, I’d always been the same. Just like my sisters, I never changed.

Before our immortality, before the fall of Coltlantis, we were creatures of change itself; as mercurial and evershifting as the sea. Then we harnessed the Heartstones, shackled our souls to their magic, and suddenly we stopped changing. We became monsters of a different order and it was only after the stones were broken that I really understood how bad we’d gotten.

It had been like being drunk all the time. Drunk on power, on immortality, and on petty, vindictive rage. We had almost no self-control and lived only to serve ourselves, and that lasted right up until Sunset and her pastel party friends blew through our magic, shattered our Heartstones, and forced us to confront what we’d become.

The weeks after the Battle of the Bands had been… ugly.

There’d been a lot of screaming at each other and arguing, a lot of crying, and eventually a few conversations that should have happened centuries ago.

Thanks to Sunset, I have my sisters back in a way that I hadn’t realised how badly I missed.

“This is bigger than I thought it would be.” I brush my fingers through my hair, tucking several strands behind my ears.

Another, smaller change, is my shorter hair. I’d cut my long pigtails after one of them had gotten caught in Billy’s chainsaw during an early Trial. That was all it had taken to convince me that maybe shorter hair would be a better choice.

“We knew it would be grim work, Ari’,” Adagio says softly.

The fire in the hearth crackles quietly as I nod and settle back into the easy chair I’m occupying in her living room and nod as I steeple my fingers and try to organise my thoughts.

After we’d left the graveyard, I’d followed Adagio back to her home on the outskirts of the Everfree so we could talk. It’s a nice place—homey and remote—and it reminds me of a certain log cabin in the heart of the Red Forest that, by now, is probably mulch.

I’m sure it reminds Adagio of the same.

“I know it’s naive to say this but—” I lower my hands and grimace “—I’d hoped things would die down quietly, you know? That we might be able to have some peace.”

“And then Sunset came back.”

I scowl at Adagio, but she raises a hand in forbearance.

“And I’m glad she did,” she continues. “Sunset means a lot to all of us, but you have to admit, she’s a stormcrow.”

“It’s not her fault,” I mutter.

Adagio shrugs and leans out from her chair to grab the poker and stoke the flames in the hearth before settling back in and meeting my gaze.

“I didn’t say it was.”

She didn’t have to. Honestly, it isn’t Sunset’s fault. Not really. Even if the reason this all happened was that she rescued us from the Trials, all that would mean is that the only way to avoid all of this would have been for us all to just stay in the Entity’s hell dimension until we were drained dry of hope and discarded, or worse, turned into Killers to serve the damn thing for eternity.

Sunset chose to save us, for better or worse, and I know that even knowing the pain she brought to the world in doing so, she would choose to do it again and again and again.

“She would have made a fantastic Siren,” I say with a quiet laugh.

Adagio’s warm chuckle joins mine, and she nods.

“If she’d been born one of us,” Adagio adds, “and it had been her up against Empress Concerta in that last debate, then Coltlantis might still be around.”

“Probably for the best then, because with Sunset at the helm of the Siren Empire we’d have ruined the world.” I laugh again as I imagine that, and it’s as terrifying as it is hilarious.

“No doubt.” Adagio runs her fingers through her long, curling orange hair and sighs as she turns back to the fire.

She hates fire, I know. Or at least a part of her does. She hates it for the same reason she hates graveyards and loud, abrasive men. They all remind her of the things that took away her mortal family. Once, I asked her how she does it. How she keeps going. She took a long time before finally answering.

‘Some days, I don’t.’ Is what she told me.

“How long do you think it will take Sunset to find them now that we know who they are?” I ask.

Adagio shrugs. “A few days, I’d imagine. No more.”

That’s my estimate too. Sunset is like a bloodhound; once she’s on your trail it takes an act of Nodens to shake her loose. Now that she has the Legion’s scent, finding their home base would be only a matter of time. I don’t know how she’ll do it, but I have no doubt in my mind that she will.

Because she’s Sunset Shimmer.

But the Thief is no fool. They’ve spent the last year successfully evading us through expert use of the Fog, and they had to know they were being hunted, even if they didn’t know who precisely was hunting them.

Who precisely…

My eyes go wide as I look up at Adagio, and she meets my gaze with a narrow look.

“What?” She sits up straighter and looks at me sharply. “What is it?”

“They know it’s us,” I say hollowly.

Adagio raises an eyebrow. Then her fair features go pale as she catches on.

“The alleyway fight,” Adagio mutters, and I nod.

“There’s no way Legion didn’t recognise her,” I continue. “If they’re not full-blown Killers then they’ve gotta have some of their minds left intact, which means that even if the Thief doesn’t know where to find Sunset herself—”

“—then they at least know who she’s working with!” Adagio stands sharply and sweeps imperiously out of the den and into the kitchen.

Ice sluices down my spine as I follow her up and across the room. This is so stupid! We should have realised it days ago when Sunset first mentioned the possibility of the Legion’s identity. Sunset rarely goes anywhere on foot nowadays, preferring to access Canterlot through the Fog, which always struck me as reckless. Now though, I think it might have been the only thing that’s kept her hidden.

The rest of us aren’t so lucky.

“No signal,” Adagio says neutrally as she looks down at her phone. “You?”

I pull my phone out, check the bars, and swallow hard as I look back up at my big sister and shake my head. No bars. No signal.

“They’re here.”

It’s all Adagio says as she turns to the door leading out into the wider campground and opens it. The smell of the evening air floods into the house, and on its heels is the stink of blood and ashes. The stink of the Fog and of the Entity’s realm.

The stink of the Trials.

Adagio closes a white-knuckled grip around the wood-ax leaning by the door, hefts it up with one hand, and moves the other to her belt where a chipped white half-mask made in the fashion of a wild hare is tied securely. She pulls the mask free and slips the securing straps over her head, pulls it tight, and draws in a ragged, hissing breath as we step outside into what had, less than an hour ago, been a clear winter’s night, and is now so thick with Fog we can barely see six meters out.

How many, is the question now, though. How many of them are here? All three of them? How many are coming for my sister and I?

My answer comes on the report of a gunshot as a barbed harpoon splits through the concealing Fog, and with it the thunder of the Heartbeat explodes into existence. The harpoon hits with uncanny accuracy, hammering into Adagio’s chest, punching through—and hooking into—flesh and bone, driving her back two steps before the chain bolted to the end of the spike goes taut and heaves her forward onto her knees.

“ADAGIO!” I start to lunge forward only to be forced into a backstep as my sister swings the flat of her ax at me.

“RUN, IDIOT!”

She screams out the two words just before her breath is stolen in a wash of blood as she’s dragged forward into the Fog. It goes against the grain in the worst possible way, but I do it. I turn on my heel and run in the opposite direction. I’d expected the brats, but clearly the Thief wasn’t fucking around.

Maybe they were watching back at the alley somehow, and saw Adagio, or maybe they just scouted her out after the fact, but the fact is they must have known Adagio’s secret.

They were ready for her.

A shiver goes down my spine and, on instinct, I dive to the right just as another gunshot rings out, and the harpoon that had gutted my sister flies past me. It comes so close I can smell the stink of Adagio’s Fog-tainted blood on it before whatever mechanism is driving it catches and reels it back in.

They’re fast. Faster than I gave them credit for. The figure bleeds out of the Fog like a specter of the old west. Their wide-brimmed hat is low, concealing most of their face save for a single eye that glows like a cold, dim floodlight peering at me through a notch in the hat’s brim, and their mantled duster flaps faintly in the shifting air, the ragged edges barely brushing the tips of the grass as they stalk towards me. Their hands move with slick, clean practice; clearing the spent cartridge with a smooth click-clack and chambering a new one in the same motion.

Reloading gives a brief delay in their movement and I use it to sprint away, and the Heartbeat wanes, then waxes as the Killer starts to make up the distance.

There’s no way they finished off Adagio that fast, they couldn’t have. I have to believe that. The amount of bodily trauma it takes to end a Killer is extreme, but they must have wounded her pretty badly to just walk away from her like that.

All I can do is pray to the Deep that she’ll shake it off because there’s no way I can take this freak one on one.

The treeline comes into view and a surge of hope hits me. That’s right! This isn’t a Trial. Not a real one anyway. There are no circling walls. No Terminus gates. There’s nothing keeping me from just hauling ass into the forest and hiding! If I can just make the trees and break line of sight I’ll be—

The itch goes down my spine, and I dive to the right again, and as I do, I curse at myself for moving in the same direction as before. Gunshot thunder heralds a punch to my ribs that rips me out of the air and nails me to the tree I’d been trying to get behind.

I can’t breath and I’m positive that every rib in my right side must be broken. My torso feels like its on fire as I wheeze and gasp and try to drag air into my bruised lungs. I don’t get the opportunity to, though, because a second later I’m ripped from the tree as the Legion’s ‘handler’ drags me towards them, turning a handcrank on the side of the longarm to reel their stuck quarry with palpably sadistic satisfaction.

Every inch of my will is spent forcing myself to my feet; forcing myself to fight against the dragging, inevitable strength of a Killer. It almost feels like they’re pleased I got up.

Pleased that I wasn’t that easy to kill.

Not that it matters.

Before I can pull the harpoon free, it manages to drag me close enough to release the catch and lunge forward at me, and I get a brief glimpse of a wickedly sharp underslung bayonet curving up to gore me.

The handler staggers just as it closes and, rather than gutting me, it cuts a broad, painful, but shallow gash along my chest, and I scream as I stagger back and turn to run. I glance back in time to see the gunslinger stand shakily with a hatchet buried in the meat of their back.

Adagio!

“Thank Nodens,” I gasp.

I run for the edge of the forest just as Adagio comes tearing out of the Fog, her lullaby ragged and furious on her lips as she charges down the gunslinger and takes a hard swing with her ax. The last thing I see is the bastard Killer catching the Fog-forged steel of my sister's weapon on the unnaturally sturdy stock of their rifle before I dive into the cover of the Everfree.

This forest is no tamed wilderness like so many other ‘wild’ places on this continent. This is one of the old places, like the Red Forest, and the trees have grown into thick, choking walls of green foliage and dark bark.

There’s no way that thing will be able to hit me in here.

My vision swims as I drop to my knees and crawl towards the bole of an old-growth chestnut oak. I’m losing a lot of blood. Too much for even a Killer to have realistically inflicted.

“Damn, that’s right,” I mutter as I curl up against the tree. “Their weapons… something’s wrong with them.”

All of the victims suffered from deep, ragged wounds. Even though they’d mostly died to extreme trauma—stabbings and beatings mostly—it hadn’t taken a genius to see that even if their attackers had lost them, they’d still have died of exsanguination anyway.

But they weren’t Survivors.

I take a deep breath of the Fog as I grip the lower half of my shirt and tear at it, creating a set of dirty if workable makeshift bandages, and set to tying the wound shut. My vision has narrowed to a grey tunnel by the time I manage to finish pulling the fabric tight, and it's a struggle to focus on my surroundings.

The heartbeat is still distant, but it’s steady.

Are they standing still? Maybe the Killer and my sister are still struggling with one another.

Or maybe they're waiting for me to emerge. I guess I can’t stay in here forever. Even if I can’t die of sepsis, I still need food and water. The question is: are they willing to wait that long?

Slowly, I emerge from the bole of the tree, my hand pressed to the wound across my side and chest as I step into the low light—

“Urk~”

Copper wetness floods my mouth and spills from between my lips as a figure steps out of the shadows and I look down…

Down at what looks, absurdly, like a metal school ruler buried in my gut.

I follow the line of the ruler to the crude grip made of leather cord and masking tape, and to the porcelain-pale hand that’s holding it.

Where’s the Heartbeat?

She’s wearing a dark, baggy black hoody, and as my gaze draws up past her chest to her face I realise something.

“M-Mask…” I mutter through bubbling blood.

She’s not wearing a mask.

“Ssshh…” Sweetie Belle whispers softly as she pushes me back and lowers me to the ground. “We’re going home now.”

The Fog closes in but, mercifully, the blackness comes first.