Blood, hot and thick, drenches my hand as my claws punch through the Legion’s back as she stands in front of the locker. She screams and flails as I rip her away from the doors, turning to throw her to the ground where she spasms and twists until she’s on all fours, looking for all the world like a feral cat.

“Last time you got the jump on me,” I growl as I clash my fingers and advance on her. “And I was only half-there, and I still almost killed you… you may have a Trial backing you, but I’ve got power and experience, you little half-breed.”

Legion stood shakily, her front punctured and drenched with thick and quickly clotting blood. The wound will be closed now that she’s instinctively drawing power from her Trial to heal herself, but she’s nowhere near my grade, and this is no wholesome healing. It can knit flesh but she will wear down eventually, just like I was starting to do at the end of the Exodus.

“Well?” I say, raising my arms and advancing on the crouched half-Killer. “Are we going to—?”

She bolts at me before I can finish my sentence, shrieking her tinny little war cry as she leaps at me. I don’t run. I rush forward to meet her charge, catching and turning her blade on my fingers with a deafening clash of metal-on-metal, while my other hand flashes down to open five deep cuts that bare her flesh down to the white of her ribs.

It doesn’t even faze her.

She staggers back from the impact but recovers impossibly fast—fueled by the magic of her Trial—and lunges again.

“Shit!” I snap my arms up to guard and let her bury her weapon halfway into my arm.

The bite of her Fog-forged blade is an ugly thing, and I can feel the unnatural magic bound into it chewing away at my flesh and bone, turning the wound into something ragged and difficult to heal even for something like me. If I were human, it might be enough to put me down. I’d definitely bleed out faster than I had any right to.

I haven’t been human for a long while, though.

“Try again!” I snarl, jerking the arm that carries her blade to the side and dragging Legion’s guard wide open for me to lunge in and up, driving my blades into the soft meat under her chin, beneath her mask, and up into her head.

Blood drenches down my arm again as she lets out a gurgling scream. Anything else would be dead a hundred times over, but this little bitch is nothing if not persistent as she rips her weapon out of my arm, flips it on her palm, and then drives it into my neck.

I tear my blades out of her and stumble back, pressing my hand to the newly fountaining wound near my throat while the Legion staggers drunkenly away from me, shakes her head, then turns and sprints away.

A wounded predator is still a threat and, unlike me, she’ll heal quickly.

“Damn it,” I gasp, dredging up a few sips of magic out of myself to seal up the wound. This Fog isn’t mine to use, it takes a lot of effort to drink anything worthwhile from it.

This is why I didn’t want to get into a fight.

“W-Who are you?”

I freeze at the soft, familiar tone of Fluttershy’s voice, a voice I haven’t heard in damn near two years.

You’re not our friend!

Not since that day in the halls of CHS.

And you never were!

Not since I was human.

“Are… are you okay?”

Heaving a quiet sigh, I brace myself. I knew this was coming the moment Fluttershy was taken. If I was going to rescue her, then odds were good I was going to have to out myself.

“Been better,” I rasp through my slowly mending throat. “But you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, Flutters?”

She’s as pretty as I remember, with her long flowing pink hair, bright blue eyes, button nose, and gentle complexion. Her yellow cardigan is ripped in places where it isn’t stained with dirt and blood, and her pajama pants are in no better shape.

I see all of that as I turn to face her and let her see me. All of me. All of Sunset Shimmer, the Entity’s Nightmare.

The look on her face would be funny if we weren’t all possibly about to die.

Fluttershy, still half-crammed in a dirty locker and caked in blood and filthy snow, stares at me with eyes that are wide in disbelief. I can see the denial trying to work itself out in her brain. We don’t have time for this, but I know I’m not going to be able to move her with any kind of grace if we don’t get it out of the way, so I let her have her moment.

She takes two halting steps out of the locker, shivers, then moves closer to me. She’s smaller than I remember, or maybe my mind just made them all a little more threatening in my memories. The top of her pink-haired crown only comes to just past my chin, and she tips her head up to stare at me for a long moment before reaching out with a shaking hand to touch my cheek.

“It’s uhm… it’s been a long time.” I hate how my voice goes so raw when I speak.

Fluttershy sniffles as she traces the blue-veined lines of my face with her fingers.

“Is it really you?” she asks in a ghostly tone.

I draw back my hand from the wound on my neck which has sealed up, leaving a nasty scar but nothing else.

“After a fashion,” I say with a wry smile.

“But you’re dead.”

“You’re not wrong.”

Fluttershy takes a step back and looks me up and down, and I see the breakdown coming before the first tear wells up. Her breath hitches, her chest heaves, and her face twists into an agonised rictus of grief. She swallows thickly once, then twice, and I sag and sigh before raising my arms and gesturing broadly.

“Fine, go ahead, get it out of your sys—oof!”

She tackles me like a linebacker, her slender frame hiding a surprising amount of strength as she rams into my chest and squeezes for all she’s worth, burying her face in my chest as she lets out a long, keening cry.

It’s all I can do not to flay her back open on instinct and I almost bite through my lip as I grit my teeth and bear it while Fluttershy sobs out half-mumbled apologies and clings to me. I keep my arms up, out, and well away from her soft, sliceable skin. Killers were not made to be hugged and the last thing I need is to be explaining to Rainbow Dash why I did the Legion’s job for them.

Now with that said…

“You get five more seconds before I start taking limbs,” I say as calmly as possible.

Fluttershy, true to form even after all this time, doesn’t pull away until the very last second, and when she does it’s only reluctantly.

“Don’t get used to this,” I say, lowering my arms and gesturing between us as she steps away from me. “This is a temporary deal until we get out of here, now stick close, stay low, and follow me.”

I don’t wait for her to agree I just start moving in the opposite direction that the Legion hared off in. If I’m lucky, Adagio found the other three and we can haul ass if not… well, I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.

“It… it is you, right?” Fluttershy asks softly from behind me as we trudge through the snow. “Sun...Sunset?

Where’s the too-shy-to-talk version of Fluttershy when you need her?

“As I said,” I reply grimly. “After a fashion.”

“What does that mean?! What are you?”

I shoot Fluttershy a withering glare over my shoulder that nails her to the spot as her eyes go wide. She’s terrified of me, and well she should be. Her reaction is the natural one, and it’s the one that Wallflower should have had when she saw my real face for the first time.

This… this reaction I know how to deal with. That one? Not so much.

“I’m just a nightmare, Flutters,” I say as exhaustion suddenly weighs on my shoulders, and I turn away from her. “I’ll be gone with daylight. That’s how nightmares work.”

“B-But—!”

“No buts!” I snap, whirling back on her and jabbing a bladed finger at her face. “We are not having this conversation now, or ever, got it?! After this, you’re going to go home and go back to having forgotten I ever existed, and that’s that!”

Fluttershy stares at me for several beats of my not-quite heart before saying:

“Is that what you think?”

Her voice is so soft I almost miss her words and it’s strange… something about her expression caves in on itself slowly as she speaks. It’s almost like watching someone die in slow motion.

“What else is there to think?” I ask cooly. “You’ve got a life and a future, and I’ve got knives for fingers and ice in my veins.”

I turn away from her and start walking. I don’t have time for this. No one does. Either she follows me and we start getting people out of this shithole, or Legion can have her. The soft crunch of snow tells me she’s falling in behind me, and I don’t know if I’m frustrated or relieved.

“Do you really think that’s all there is to it?” Fluttershy asks on the heels of a choking sob.

My teeth grind as I clench my jaw. Just my luck it would have to be Fluttershy I run across first and not literally anyone else. Then again, she’s probably the most enticing target for someone like that slice-happy little harridan.

Fluttershy stumbles past me, hobbling through the snow until she gets in front of me and seizes me by the collar of my jacket. Tears stream down her face, freezing in their tracks and leaving behind trails of salty rime on her cheeks as she stares up at me with desperation.

“Every day,” she says haltingly. “I think about you every day.”

“Horse. Shit.”

I knock her hands away from my coat but she puts them right where they were and, if anything, grips even tighter. I don’t know if she’s trying to pull me closer to her but all she succeeds in doing is hauling herself up to her own tip-toes.

“It’s not!” She cries. “There are mornings I wake up and the thought of you is so heavy I can’t breathe, and nights when the memories hurt so bad I can’t sleep! There are days when just knowing that you’re gone is so painful that I… that I want to…”

She puts a tentative palm on my cheek as she starts sobbing and shaking, and a soft hiss escapes her perfect lips at the scalding heat of my unnatural flesh. A growl surfaces up from the depths of my chest, but she ignores it as she brushes her hand over my face, inch by inch.

Slowly, gently, I take her hand by the wrist and pry it from my face, and her expression pinches at the iron in my grip.

“You know,” I start quietly, “I always hated how effortlessly pretty you always were… back in our school days.”

“W-Wha—?”

“I hated how you could probably stumble half-starved out of the woods looking like a supermodel,” I continue. “I hated how your smile could just brighten a whole room,” I snarl out the words with saccharine venom, “and most of all… I hated how not one. Fucking. Speck. Of that beauty was less than marrow-deep.”

I drop her hand and knock her back away from me.

“Pretty Fluttershy,” I spit. “Beautiful, inside and out.

“That’s the part that always got me. It’s why I always made a point to pick on you back in my good old bad days. I hated how insecure you made me feel. I hated how you were this fucking mirror of what I might have been!”

She stumbles back and away from me as I advance on her. Hate and rage are boiling in my veins and I can barely contain my instincts. I would give almost anything to drown in her terror, but I can’t… I… I can’t!

“Sunset, no,” Fluttershy sobs. “You… were… a-are—”

“Oh I know I was beautiful too,” I say as she backs into a tree and pins herself there while I loom over her, “but deep down I also knew that that beauty was only surface level. I knew it was nothing but a cheap skin, and now…” I raise my arms, “now my outsides just reflect what was always there.”

She freezes as I put a hand on either side of her head and grip gently, laying the cool, sharp edges of my fingerblades across her soft skin. I can feel her shaking. I can feel the tremors in my skin and the way her blood pumps and thumps with every rabbit-like beat of her heart. I can smell her sweat and adrenaline as I force her to stare into my eyes, unblinking and…

A quiet chuckle escapes my lips as I relax back and slowly ease the pressure of my grip, although she remains ramrod stiff and I smirk past too-sharp teeth at her.

“You know what the best part of being left broken-hearted and crying on that filthy hallway floor was, Flutters?” I ask wryly, and I don’t wait for an answer as she blinks at me in vapid confusion. “The best part is that, when you screamed at me that I wasn’t your friend and never was, it’s the first time you were finally not perfect, so thanks for that, at least.”

I let go of her and she drops bonelessly to the snowy ground with a quiet, muffled thud, and I walk past her. I take a few steps before pausing and looking back.

“Mourn me if you want,” I say quietly, “but you were right… whatever Princess Twilight expected of you, I’m not your friend, and I never was.”

Fluttershy shivers as she wraps her arms around herself.

“What if… what if I want you to be?” She asks without looking up.

I blow out a quiet sigh and shake my head.

“Too little,” I say, “and far, far too late. Now get up… we’ve got a long night ahead of us.”

Fluttershy follows sullenly in my wake as I lead us around the edges of Ormond. Part of me wants to try and get her out of here immediately, but I’m reluctant for a couple of reasons.

The first being obvious: I don’t want to leave Adagio bereft of backup for any longer than I absolutely have to, and without her tracking skills I have no guarantee I’ll be able to get back into this place without some serious sorcery that will leave me pretty much useless should a real fight break out.

Secondly, I don’t know what will happen when I try to leave. For all I know, the Thief will try to clap back on me, and if they do I’d rather have the magical grunt of two Fogborn Killers to fend it off, rather than just my scrawny, well-educated ass.

I’m dangerous, but I’m not ‘fight off a newborn god toe-to-toe on their own turf’ dangerous.

“Can uhm—” Fluttershy starts, and I flick a narrow look back at her. She stammers over her words for a moment, but only a moment, before regaining her composure.

“Why can’t I hear you?”

I raise an eyebrow.

“Hear me what?” I ask.

“Your… that awful heartbeat… I can’t hear it around you,” she says carefully.

Ah, that. I nod as I turn to sweep my gaze over the snowy landscape, making sure there were no shapes hurtling towards us from the distance. Ormond is larger than a normal Trial, or at least it feels that way. It’s more open too, but all the detritus, combined with the constant snow and wind, makes seeing anything painfully difficult.

It’s almost worse than the Fog.

Gesturing for her to continue following, I start walking again while I order my thoughts. It's easier to do that while I’m distracted with pathfinding, and it’s certainly easier if I’m not looking at her.

“It’s because I’m not fully ‘switched on’, I guess you could say,” I start. “Neither is Adagio or Sonata, neither of them project a Heartbeat. Aria noticed it first and while we obviously can’t know for sure, the running theory is that it’s a… a mental thing.”

“How do you mean?” Fluttershy asks softly.

I pause by a copse of trees and gesture for her to come closer while I pin myself to the bark and take a look around. Still no sign of the others. Damn it.

Most likely they’re hiding. At this point I may as well try and extract Fluttershy. Maybe I can get her to Rainbow Dash and still get back to Adagio…

“Sunset?”

I suppress a snapping response and turn back to her, fixing my dark, Killer’s gaze on her.

For a moment—just a breath, really—I let it all fall away; the world and all of its pointless meanderings. The pain of aping at being human knowing full well I’ll never measure up. The sense of alienation from the rest of the world, leaving me bereft of any real companionship outside of my own brutal kind.

All of that falls away as I submerge beneath my hate and grief and rage, and oh-so-briefly let myself go back to the first moments of true freedom I felt when the Old Stain ripped away the weakness of Sunset Shimmer, and I allow the Nightmare to surface.

Fluttershy jerks violently away from me, and in that moment I know she can hear it. I know she can hear the way my heart thunders in my chest in anticipation. I know that she can see the way my lips curl back to bare hungry fangs.

Then I let it go. I force that part of me back into the dark, dark hole I dug it out of and bury it deep beneath the dead earth of my mind.

“What…?” Fluttershy breathes the word out but nothing else follows it.

“The Heartbeat is a projection from the Killer to their prey,” I say, forcing my tone into a neutral calm as I grapple with the ugly urges inside of me.

I can’t keep my fingers from twitching noisily though.

“A projection?” she repeats. “Of what?”

“Of our need to kill you,” I say. “That’s how you know the difference between me—” I tap a fingerblade against my chest “—and them.” I nod out towards the Lodge.

That annoyingly gentle smile of hers settles across her lips.

“It’s more than that, you know,” she says.

I don’t return the smile, I just shake my head as a quiet scoff escapes me. I’ll let her continue to think that if she wants, I have neither the time nor the desire to try and bully my way through her aggressively optimistic view of me and this isn’t the place to do it anyhow.

This isn’t where I want to try and explain to her exactly how little really separates me from the true and loyal priests of the Entity.

“Fluttershy,” I start, changing the subject, “if I get you to the main treeline, do you think you’d be able to get off the mountain?”

Fluttershy shakes her head. “We can’t, we already tried that… there’s something stopping us, like an invisible wall that shoves us back here. We can’t get more than a couple of feet into the forest before the Fog thickens and knocks us out of it.”

Figures. That was a stupid question. I should have known Aria would have already tried that. She knows what she’s about.

“Okay, that’s not surprising,” I say, shaking my head. “So we need to traverse the Fog to get off this mountain, which means I need my Huntress to sniff us a way out.”

Before she can reply, she goes rigid again, and this time I know it’s not me. It’s the only warning I get before the sound of furious, feral panting hits my ears followed a split-second later by pounding footfalls across hard-packed snow, and I whip around, brandishing my blades and snarling out a wordless challenge, as another one of the little freaks barrels into me.

I knock the blade—a crude tool I think but I don’t get a good look—away with one hand before it pierces flesh and leaves me with another one of those vicious, sucking wounds, and ram my other hand two knuckles deep into their gut, wrench them up, and hurl them over my shoulder to impact a tree with bone-breaking force. Any other living being would have a splintered spine, but these little bastards just will not stay down.

This Legion isn’t the faceless, cracked-mask I chased off before. This one’s mask is white with hollowed-out circle-dots for eyes and a wide, hand-daubed rictus of a grin.

“Scootaloo, no!” Fluttershy cries, and I snap my gaze to her. The Legion does the same, and if she’s right about which one this is then Flutters may have inadvertently just changed the fight in my favor.

“Are you sure?” I ask Fluttershy, not looking away from the Legion as they vacillate between me, the threat, and her, the prey. “Are you absolutely sure that that’s Scootaloo?”

Fluttershy gives me a panicked look, then turns back to Legion for a brief moment, eyeing the murderous figure carefully, before looking back at me and nodding.

“It’s her,” she squeaks. “I’m positive.”

My lips stretch out into an animal grin.

I start to reach out with my magic, my Oneiromancy, to dig into Scootaloo’s mind, only to wince and draw back. The Fog is too thin here, at least as far as I’m concerned, for me to wield my magic at a range like I used to.

I’ll have to go claws-deep.

“Sorry Scoots,” I mutter.

Another familiar, frenzied shriek howls out to our left like the bark of a rabid coyote before I can make another attempt, and cracked-mask comes screaming out of the dense Fog with her makeshift ruler-stake out.

“Shit!”

I turn and swipe wide as she lunges for me, taking her stake along with a thumb, two fingers, and a generous spray of blood before planting a boot in her gut to knock her away. She screams and staggers away, clutching her ruined hand and howling.

It costs me, though, as Scootaloo hits my back and hammers her keyhole saw between my ribs.

I taste blood and spit a curse as I wrench myself off of the makeshift weapon, twist on my axis, and lash out but Scootaloo backsteps, spoiling my slash with a wide strike from her blade before finding her footing, surging forward and making a hard, lateral cut.

She’s got no grace and less technique, but it doesn’t matter when every kiss from that blade shreds flesh like Billy’s chainsaw. Even a grazing hit could be lethal if I’m not careful. I can already feel the blood spilling from the hole in my side and soaking through while my unholy biology struggles to heal the cursed wound.

That said, unlike the cracked-mask, Scootaloo has some semblance of talent. She actually tries to dodge me, and her freakish speed combined with the bevy of physical enhancements that make up her Killer gift leaves me struggling to land a clean blow.

Nothing less than serious trauma will stick, either. While I duel Scootaloo, I keep my peripheral vision on cracked-mask who’s busy regenerating her mutilated hand. It’s not as fast as, say, Trapper, who recongealed his whole-ass hand by main force of will in my Trial, but Trapper is an order of magnitude more powerful.

The fact that this half-breed is managing actual regeneration means she must be very close to true Killerhood.

I have to end this fast.

Abandoning all pretense of defense, I surge forward with a feral snarl on my lips, lunging at Scootaloo with all blades out. The sudden attack catches her off-guard, and although she gets her blade halfway into my side, it’s a loose hit that doesn’t stick like it might have.

My hit is clean and brutal, though.

Ten blades ram into her skull, five on either side, and I dump the full, main force of my power into her brain using her name like a password to blitz past her mental defenses.

Scootaloo.

I know her, I know her face and her name, and now, with her mind bared under the claws of my magic, I can feel the mortal buried underneath all of that Fog that I knew would be there.

This is why I call the Legion newbloods and half-breeds. This is what carves the bloody line between true Fogborn like me, and these shallow mockeries of the Old Stain’s genetic sorcery.

You see… Mortals still dream.

“WELCOME TO MY WORLD!”

I drag Scootaloo’s mind shrieking into the abyss and plunge her into the monochrome realm of my Nightmare. I turn off her power with all the effort of flicking a light switch. Her mortal mind—the mind of the girl named Scootaloo, and not the Killer called Legion—comes roaring to the surface, mixing like oil and water with her frenzied Killer-self, poisoning that cold, perfect part of her with such mortal fears.

At the same time, I sink my metaphorical teeth into her Fog-bruised soul, and the heady mixture of terror, rage, and helpless fury is like spring water to a parched woman. I drink deep of that magic, guzzling it down to refill my reserves. I pour it into the brutal wounds, sealing them shut even as Scootaloo knocks my hands away from her, freeing herself from my grip.

It doesn’t matter. She’s locked out of the lion’s share of her power. Power that I just helped myself to in the form of a big, fat, bite.

“Mmm… that’s the stuff~” I moan as I stagger back from her, finally feeling rested and full in a way I can’t describe in any mortal sense.

I lick my lips as I turn on the now-regenerated and fully-powered Legion, and crack my neck.

“Hey Flutters,” I say as I stalk towards the stake-wielding psychopath.

“Y-Yes?”

“Run and find the others.”

Fluttershy’s boots make small crunches in the snow and I clash my fingerblades in anticipation of the coming bloodshed.

“What about you?” she asks.

I glance over at her and give her a lopsided smirk full of sharp teeth.

“Don’t worry,” I say with a grin. “I got this.”

With a halting nod, Fluttershy turns and hauls ass towards the lodge, and Scootaloo lights off in pursuit. Cracked-mask tries to go after her too, but I put some of that stolen magic to good use and flicker from where I’m standing, putting myself between her and the fleeing Fluttershy.

Scoots is half-mad with a dream-curse and barely even a Killer anymore, if Fluttershy can keep her feet under her she should be fine. That’s the best I can give her.

“Okay, half-breed.” I lace my bladed fingers and crack my knuckles. “Schools in.”

Author's Note

Seize this momentum! Push on to the task's end!

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