A hatchet slams into the thick bark of the tree I step out from behind less than a fingers-breadth from my head as I leave the Fog—and the Everfree forest—and enter the open expanse of Camp Everfree where Adagio and her little family make their home.

Adagio, who’s pacing like a caged animal and panting with wet, raw heaves of breath. She’s gripping her wood-ax in her right hand and drawing out another hatchet with her left, and I can feel the madness bubbling off of her like a toxic miasma. She’s closer to losing herself to the Huntress than she’s ever been. At least since she managed to escape the Trial.

At her feet is the shattered remains of a cell phone. Probably broken when she started really losing control.

“Sun...set…” Adagio pants raggedly.

I swallow a dull stone of fear as I flick my gaze to the side and stare at the blue embers that are reflected back at me from the hatchet-blade. If that had hit me I would probably be down, Killer or no.

“Adagio,” I say cautiously as I look back at her, holding my bladed hands up defensively, “I need you to calm. The fuck. Down. Okay?”

“They… took… her!” Adagio barks. “They took my sister!”

Those last words come out as a barely-coherent scream that sends flecks of blood and spittle from her mouth.

“She’s my sister too,” I say tightly. “And we’re going to get her back, okay? I promise, but I need you to reel it in and work with me. Where are Sour and Starlight?”

I’m not a hundred percent sure I’m talking to Adagio anymore, or if I’m trying to converse with the Huntress because she’s stopped talking and started shaking. If it’s the former, it means she’s getting herself under control. If it’s the latter… well… things are about to get loud and messy really fast.

“Stay with me, Daj,” I say, advancing on her. “Don’t let the Old Stain win! I need you here okay? If we’re going to rescue Aria we need to work together!”

Blood trickles out from the corner of Adagio’s mouth as she stares at me through the eyeholes of her dead daughter’s half-mask. The eyes behind the mask are black as a moonless night, and her chest is heaving with hyperventilation.

I take a risk and move closer, hands up and out, and I do my best to keep my gait measured, open, and slow.

“Adagio, please,” I beg. “I need you… I can’t do this without you, so please don’t make me fight you.”

I get to her side without getting an ax to the face, so that’s a positive, and I lay a tentative hand on hers, closing my grip carefully around white knuckles.

“Please.” Maybe it’s just because of how Wallflower just treated me like a real girl, but my emotions are more raw than usual, and a wet sob escapes my throat. “Please, ‘Dagi, I need my sister. I can’t do this alone.”

To my surprise, some part of that works, because Adagio’s ragged breathing slowly evens out, and the violent tension in her body eases away slightly as she lowers the ax, with its preternaturally sharp blade, down and away from my chest.

She drops her weapon from bloodless fingers, and it lands on the sod and grass of Camp Everfree with a muted thump, and Adagio slowly raises her hands to her face to grip her mask and lift it free. Underneath it, she looks like a woman who’s been through a harrowing. Her face is pinched tight with pain, and her jaw is clenched, and it’s only as I let myself relax and step away that I realise she’s wounded.

“Shit, ‘Dagi, what happened?” I ask as I move to her side again to inspect the ugly wound in her chest. It’s deep and if she were even remotely human anymore she’d be dead several times over.

“They knew,” Adagio grunts as she drops to her knees.

I follow her down, shedding my Killer shape as I do so I can more easily examine the damage. In terms of individual wounds, there’s no such thing as a lethal blow to a Killer, at least not one that would leave anything recognizable to look at. With that said, we’re not invincible, and since Adagio and I refute the depths of our Killer states, it means there’s a part of us that’s still human and that part wears down, feels pain, and gets tired.

“How—?” I ask, then bite my tongue as I realise the answer to my own question. “The alley fight… they recognised me.”

Adagio nods. “And once they knew you were still alive, they probably told the Thief who it was that you rescued back in the Trials.”

“Sour Sweet, Starlight, Aria,” I count off, and a sliver of ice lodges in my heart as I say, “Sonata! She’s helpless what if she—!”

“I checked,” Adagio says. “While I still had some control, I checked, right after they took Aria I called Redheart, and Canterlot General is fine… Sonata is fine.”

That didn’t make any sense. If they were trying to eliminate my allies then why go for Sour and Starlight? Aria I guess I can understand, being a former Siren she was dangerous for a variety of reasons, but those two are only a step above vanilla humans.

“At least they didn’t finish you off,” I say, trying to force a small laugh into my voice. “Too stubborn, huh?”

Snorting, Adagio shakes her head.

“I put a few good notches in that gunslinger’s gun before they left,” she says. “I think they were just there to distract me, though. I was secondary, Aria was the target.”

“But why?!”

“Because they’re going after the other Survivors.”

The voice that answers my question isn’t Adagio’s, or even one that I recognise, and it has a deep, strange, crackling cadence to it that it takes me a moment to recognise as the effects of a voice modulator.

Standing straight, I pull my Killer skin around myself and clash my fingerblades against one another as I put myself in front of my wounded sister and bare my teeth. The Fog is thicker than it had been when I arrived, the herald of another of the Entity's priests, I’m sure, and I have a pretty good guess as to who it is.

From the shadows, a figure folds out of the gray nothingness like a patch of darkness given life, all but the mask which is pale, bone-white, and shaped to look like a face that’s been stretched into an exaggerated scream of terror. Every inch of their body is covered in form-fitting black cloth, from gloves to boots, to the high neck, to the cowl over their head. The dark fabric clings to them, even as it leaks off of them in ribbons of shadow, filling the air with a soft susurration.

And in their hand is a bone-handled knife that seems to eat the light around it.

“The Entity’s newblood, I presume,” I say, then glance over their shoulder at another faint motion, tensing, then relaxing as Rainbow Dash makes herself known. “And Dash, great… we’re all here.”

“They took Fluttershy,” Rainbow rasps; her face is twisted in fury, and she doesn’t look much better than Adagio.

“Shit.” I look between them, then fix on the newcomer. “You. You said the Thief is taking Survivors.” The words trail into the completed thought that I’m sure they’ve already realise. “Of course… the Thief is trying to make more of us.”

“Survivors are the foundations of Killers,” they respond casually. “It’s the easiest place to start.”

I hate to admit it, but they’re right. If the Thief wants to make more Killers like the Legion then their only options are to go through the hit-or-miss process of figuring out how to create Survivors, which could take weeks or months, or maybe even years, to fine-tune, or they could do it the easy way, and crib off the Entity’s techniques.

I know which one I’d choose.

“I am our Father’s Ghost. He sent me here to put a stop to this, and you—” they gesture at me with their knife “—are going to help me.”

“Oh am I?” I snarl.

Before I can make a mistake, Rainbow Dash, of all people, gets between us, hands on either side of her.

“You two can compare knife sizes later,” she snaps. “I just watched the girl I love get stabbed in the throat and kidnapped, and I’m going to need some friggin’ help if I’m gonna find those pint-sized murder-hobos and get her back, okay?!”

Hearing Rainbow refer to Fluttershy that way hurts. It hurts more than I expected it to, to be honest. It’s not like I didn’t know she’d moved on, at least in part, but hearing it said out loud is a blow that rattles me more than it has any right to. Fury is boiling in my veins but for once I can’t act on it, and part of the reason for that is because I don’t know why it’s even there.

Why am I so mad? Didn’t I want them to forget about me? Didn’t I want all of them to just let me go? To move on?

Rainbow still carries the wound heart I gave her in the Trials, she wouldn’t be the Blight if she didn't, but I know there’s a part of her that’s still sane and human and… and happy.

Isn’t that good?

Isn’t that what I wanted?

“Fine, just stay out of my way, Ghostface.” I put my back to the pair of them and look down at Adagio who’s taking long, slow breaths, and I hold out a hand. “Up and at’em, sis, we’re going hunting.”

She nods and takes my hand, letting me draw her up to her full height. She looks over my shoulder, her dark eyes softening to their native shade of bright raspberry as she takes in our new ‘allies’. I don’t blame her for being suspicious. I trust Dash only in so far as I know she’ll fuck up, and I trust ol’ Ghostface not at all.

“You have a map, don’t you?” Ghostface says pointedly, and a chill goes down my spine as they hold out a gloved hand. “May I see it?”

I glare down at their open palm for a moment before looking back up at them. “How do you know what I have?”

“I’ve been watching you.”

Well, that’s not deeply unnerving or anything, but I guess it’s refreshingly honest in a creepy psycho-stalker sort of way. I probably shouldn’t be surprised since Ghosty here strikes me as a stealth Killer, not unlike the Wraith only slightly saner.

“Fine.” I pull out the map from inside my jacket, careful not to cut it up with my fingers, and open it wide.

Adagio and Dash both crowd in around me, which makes my skin crawl. This is not the crowd I’d imagined when I thought about going over my findings, or lack thereof as the case may be, and I tried my best to keep my gorge down as Rainbow craned her neck to glower at the chaotic mess of dots that peppered the map of Canterlot like chickenpox.

“I don’t see anything,” Rainbow says after a moment.

“Good for you, I didn’t find anything,” I grumble. “There’s no pattern here.”

“There has to be,” Ghostface says sharply. For the first time, I hear something like agitation enter their voice. Or impatience maybe.

“You’re welcome to take a crack at it,” I say bitterly, shoving the map in their direction.

Honestly, if this hooded goober actually sees a pattern that I missed I might just eat my fingers. I realise that’s childish and vain. So sue me. I’m childish and vain. My pride has taken enough blows to the face over the past year that I don’t need this one.

Then again…

I’d trade my pride and everything else I had if it meant having my friends and family back safe and sound.

Suddenly I hope they do see something.

“Nothing.”

Ghostface lowers the map, and the only sign of emotion in them is the way the map crinkles at their fingers as they grip it a little too tightly before shoving it back to me.

“Useless…”

“Maybe not,” Adagio says suddenly as she shifts around, takes the map from us, and looks over it. “What if they’re not in the city at all?”

I frown at that and move around to Adagio’s side to look over the collection of dots again. I hadn’t considered that. This whole time I’d been working on the supposition that the Legion was hunting from somewhere around the slums adjacent to the East End or near the docks to the northeast by Lake Canter.

“They travel via the Fog,” Adagio continues, “so they don’t necessarily need to be restricted to the normal distances of a predator so if we ignore the distances and just look at location…”

Adagio trails off, then turns and sprints for the log cabin where she spends the majority of her time. It’s a small allowance to her nature that she forces herself to live alone. She sleeps in the cabin, and not with Timber and his sister Gloria, because she’s afraid that being around them too much will trigger her instincts. Maybe she’s overcautious, or maybe I’m just reckless, but I guess seeing ones family die would make anyone a little gun-shy.

Turns out it was a good call, just not for the reasons Adagio had initially thought.

She shoulders the door open and steps inside, stokes the fire for some more light, then sweeps her kitchen table clear with a stroke of her broad arm and lays out the map.

“Does someone have a pen?” Adagio asks, holding out a hand.

To my surprise, Ghostface casually pulls out a blue, ball-point pen with a slightly chewed cap, and lays it in Adagio’s hand. The elder Siren eyes it suspiciously for a moment before flicking her gaze up to Ghostface and nodding, then goes back to the maps and starts making light, shallow marks.

“The cold,” Rainbow says suddenly, and quietly, enough so that only I look up at her.

“What?”

“Something Scootaloo said before she took Fluttershy,” Rainbow continues, and that gets Adagio and Ghostface’s attention. Both Killers fix on Rainbow, who shrinks back, then clears her throat and straightens out. “She uh… she said: ‘come find me in the cold’.”

Adagio wrinkles her nose, then goes stock still before raising a hand to her lips as her jaw falls open with a muted click. Suddenly she turns to the map and starts making deeper marks; thin, sharp lines trace paths that move as the crow flies and all of them lead in an actual hunting pattern toward the same place.

An empty patch of forest in the middle of the Canterhorn range.

“No,” she whispers softly. “It can’t still be up there… can it?”

I turn to my sister, eying her cautiously. “What is it, ‘Daj? What’s up where?”

“Phone,” she says, instead of answering, and holds out her hand, “I need to call Redheart! I need to talk to Sonata!”

“Okay, yeah, here.” I fumble my phone from my pocket and toss it to her, and she snatches it out of the air with expert fingers before opening it. “Hey! How’d you know my password?!”

“Because it’s Aria’s birthday, you dorkus,” she says with a light chuckle.

My cheeks warm and I stiffen. “That’s… so what?!”

“Oh hush,” Adagio chides as she lifts the phone to her ear. “Everyone knows you’re a little in love with Aria.”

My blush goes from red to thermonuclear. “I am not!”

“Redheart? Dear, can you do me a favor?” Adagio cuts through my protest as the line connects. “Can you wake Sonata to ask her a brief and extremely important question?”

We wait, and as we do I shoot a glare over at Rainbow who’s giving me a smug grin. Ghostface is just staring at me impassively through that mask of theirs, but there’s something to the set of their shoulders that suggests… annoyance? Maybe. Or maybe they’re just getting impatient again.

“I don’t,” I say pointedly. “Don’t get me wrong, I love Aria. I would die for that woman a thousand times over with a smile on my face but…” I look back at Adagio’s who’s speaking in low tones on my phone before looking back to Rainbow, “but she’s got Redheart, and even if she didn’t I don’t think there’s enough of me left in me to give her, and Aria deserves better than that.”

“Harsh,” Rainbow says flatly.

“The truth usually is,” I reply.

I turn away from them to return to Adagio’s side, but before I can make it more than a step, a hand settles on my shoulder. I shift back with Rainbow’s name on my lips, but the name dies as I see the black-gloved hand of Ghostface, and their stretched, frozen-scream face right next to me.

“There’s plenty left of you,” they say in that odd, half-tone crackle of modulation. “Just because what’s there isn’t human doesn’t mean you’re missing anything.”

“I…” My jaw clicks open before I recover and shrug their hand off and scowl. “Easy for you to say,” I hiss as I turn and square up against them, “you don’t give a damn about being human.”

Ghostface cocks their head with something like amusement.

“And you do?”

My fingerblades clash together spasmodically as I bare my teeth at the Killer in front of me. I want to snap at them. I want to throw that smug line right back in their stupid masked face and tell them I’m not like them, but the ugly truth of the matter is that I’d be lying if I did it.

I’m not human.

I never will be again.

“Fuck you,” I snarl.

“Enough,” Adagio moves between us with a deep, angry scowl darkening her pretty features. “Thanks to our little sister’s eidetic memory, and your—” she looks over at Rainbow “—hint, I think we might actually have them.”

“Speaking of,” I counter. “Why the hint? Why would one of them let that slip? And how do we know it’s not a mislead?”

Adagio shoots Rainbow Dash, who looks unusually thoughtful for someone who tends to spend as little time in her own head as possible, with a questioning glance. Rainbow sighs quietly and meets both our gazes, and there’s nothing like the usual vim and humor I’m used to seeing on her face.

“Because I think she wants us to find them,” Rainbow replies slowly. “I don’t think Scoots wants to be… alive.”

As grim as that is, it’s a believable motivation. The life of a Killer isn’t really a life at all, and who knows what their half-life existence is really like? Especially for a girl who got gunned down and autopsied before being yanked into the Fog.

“Father will fix her,” Ghostface says pointedly, “and til then it’s to our advantage… so where are they?”

We all turn to Adagio who gives us a thin-lipped smile.

“It’s a long walk, even in the Fog,” she says, “but I’ll tell you about it on the way… we’re going to a place my sisters and I had a hand in that was once called Ormond.”

The fate of Ormond was an act of spite, like most things we did back in the good old bad days.

The Fog twists around us as we leave the cabin in the Everfree with Adagio leading the way, and her voice echoes strangely as we move through the space between spaces.

It was the seventies, I think—that sounds right—and the three of us were living up the hedonistic nightlife of the city with abandon. We were bleeding the wealthy elite for all they were worth, and we hardly even had to use our magic for it. Our beauty and wiles were more than enough to open pocketbooks and checking accounts. Plenty of men and women alike were happy to dote on three pretty little things like us.

Sometimes, I forget just how old my sisters are. It’s a strange thing, hearing about their exploits before I met them. Even moreso hearing about the things they did before they reformed. Who they are now and who they were then are, in truth, entirely different people. Who a person is under the influence of Dark Magic is not a natural extension of that person, but an exaggeration of their most extreme qualities.

And there was a man. A grotesque, sweaty, pig of a man named Bull Market who made his living exploiting others. He traded and manipulated stocks, made a living moving the money of the rich and powerful around, and he happily destroyed lives to make a few extra dollars.

Even by our standards, he was a monster. At least we had the excuse of being predators who needed to siphon magic through negative emotions to survive. He could have retired years ago on the money in his personal accounts and still lived like a king until he drowned himself in excess, but he didn’t… that man always wanted more, and therein lay the problem.

When he saw Aria, all he wanted was her.

That made my stomach twist in a hundred different terrible ways. Obviously, this guy, Bull, had no idea who he was messing with, but just the idea of a sleaze-bag like that trying to get his grubby hands on my sister made my blood boil.

He damned himself one night at a party when he tried to coerce my sister into… well, I’m sure you can imagine. Needless to say, she shot him down in her usual cruel manner, but a man like Bull Market doesn’t take no for an answer. He manhandled her, grabbing at her with his grubby hands, and when she fought back, he slapped her.

If I could travel back in time to kill a man, I would. With that said, I curbed my rage and waited. Something told me that whatever Adagio and her sisters subjected him to makes whatever I would have done look like a mercy.

We sang him off of her, and I thought about just breaking his mind then and there, but I didn’t. We didn’t. Even Sonata was furious, and so we settled back to inflict a more… appropriate punishment on him. You see, Bull had recently sunk an enormous amount of capital into the construction of a ski lodge and resort nestled in the crook of the Canterhorn range, and it was a good idea. Had he only not laid a hand on my sister that night, he would have been rich beyond the dreams of avarice, but alas.

Adagio’s smile was a palpable force. It’s not often she speaks of her and her sisters’ shared past with relish. Usually, there’s a tinge of shame or self-hatred in the stories, and that’s on the rare occasion that they’re told at all. This, though, I can tell she has no qualms about whatsoever.

It started small. We whispered, sang, and greased palms here and there, and slowly the delays began to accrue; late supply shipments, shoddy materials, accidents, and high worker turnover stretched the construction timeline. It started with an order of weeks, then months, and Bull had no choice but to sink more and more of his investors’ money into the project. There was a point that he might have been able to pull out with minimal losses, but we made sure to measure our interference until he was committed beyond the point of no return, and that was when we laid the coup de grâce.

Sabotage. Worker strikes. Union pickets. Even a little riot here and there. Construction came to a grinding halt, and the timeline went from months to years, and one by one his investors cut him loose, cutting their losses and leaving that rude little canker of a man to fend for himself. With debts soaring, no end to negotiations in sight, and no more support, Bull tried to flee the country, but the very wealthy are not dissimilar to dragons.

Steal from their hoard, and face the fires.

By the time we left, Bull Market was a shell of a man facing dozens of charges of negligence, embezzlement, and fraud, and last I heard of him he died penniless in prison.

All because he touched my sister.

“Good riddance,” I mutter as we tread the Fog.

“After all that, we left,” Adagio continues. “We left Canterlot for decades and thought nothing more of it. I haven’t thought of Bull in ages, but Sonata remembers everything… including the location of the Mount Ormond Lodge.”

A forgotten ski lodge nestled in the crook of the mountains, hidden amongst a thick forest and heavy snowfall, would make for an ideal hiding spot. Not only that, a place steeped in that kind of human misery and fallout would be perfect foundation stones for a Trial. Ormond represented the systematic dismantling of a human life. That the life belonged to a man who didn’t deserve anything he had didn’t matter.

What matters, in this case, is the despair.

“Guess ‘find me in the cold’ definitely points to a frozen-ass ski lodge,” Rainbow grumbles. “You think this’ll be like your nightmare-version of CHS?”

“Bet on it,” I say tightly. “If it wasn’t a Trial before, my guess is that it is now.”

“It would explain why they were collecting Survivors,” Ghostface adds in their odd, mechanical crackle.

A real Trial, here, in the human world. This is worse than bad. If the Thief manages to complete a full Trial ritual—or multiple—they might actually get power enough to create another fully-fledged Killer, or even another entire Trial. Then it’s a snowball effect. More Killers, more Trials, more power for the Thief, until we have a full-blown, newborn Entity.

The thought of two of those things roaming the netherspaces of the multiverse makes me shudder. At least the Old Stain knows its place in the cosmic web. I don’t know if I can say the same about whoever the newest incumbent to the power is.

If they’re breaking this many rules already, who knows what kind of damage they could do.

I really don’t need something this heavy on my shoulders. I never signed up for this shit. I just want to save my friends.

That’s all I ever wanted. All I ever tried to do.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

“We’re here.”

I look up just as the Fog begins to clear. Adagio, at our head, was our guide, leading us through the shifting pathways of her memories to a place where she and her sisters left an indelible mark on the skin of the world.

As the Fog thins, the air grows dry and frigid, and I tense as my feet settle from the formlessness of our pathway to the cold, coarse snow of the Canterhorn range. The scent of pine needles and ice fills my nose as towering, ancient evergreens resolve into existence around us until finally we’re left on a real path.

The road to Ormond.

Author's Note

Back to the Pit.

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