My moment of numbness lasts all of a heartbeat before reality slams into me with the force of Billy’s chainsaw. Ghostface took a hit for me. A big one. Maybe even deadly with the amount of damage I’ve taken.

“Shit!”

I lunge forward as the Deathslinger’s chain goes taut, reaching back behind Ghostface to shear through the links with a grinding snap of my claws just as the gun-toting Killer pulls back on the winch to reel in their catch. Ghostface crumples against me, and I catch them as best I can.

“You’re okay, you’re okay.” I repeat the words like a mantra as I turn them over and drag them out into cover behind a piece of collapsed flooring and out of the Deathslinger’s line of sight. “You hear me? You’re gonna be just fine.”

Ghostface shudders, tensing and twitching as I take a moment to examine their wound. It’s a bad one. Worse than getting cut by the Legion’s little pigstickers by far. The harpoon is punched straight through, and my stomach twists as I realise the sick bastard has wrapped the already wicked tip of the weapon in thin, vicious barbed wire.

There’s no getting that thing out without tearing a bigger hole.

“I-It hurts,” Ghostface grunts. “It’s not… not fair… I’m not s-supposed to hurt anymore, Father p-promised.”

“Only Killers can hurt other Killers,” I say quietly as I start trying to clip through the barbed wire with my fingers.

“Get… Get it out, p-please.”

In the short time that I’ve known Ghostface, I’ve never heard anything in their voice like the kind of emotion I’m hearing now. They’re almost always careful, clipped, and professional. This is different. This isn’t Ghostface. It’s the person under the mask. I hate that I forgot how young they must be. A newborn Killer, fresh from the Old Stain’s genetic soulforge.

So new that they probably don’t even have their own Trial yet. New enough to survive in the Real without constantly being pulled into the Fog.

“I can’t,” I say, doing my best to keep my voice steady. “If I do, it might kill you for good, and if you go back into the Fog, I don’t know if the Old Stain will have enough grunt to push you back through the veil, can you stand?”

Ghostface swallows thickly and tries to lever themselves up but the moment they move, the harpoon grinds, and their blood wells out in thick rivulets.

So that’s a no.

Breathing deep, I pull some of the residual Fog of the Trial into myself. Without the Legion commanding it, it’s basically free energy. Not particularly efficient energy in this state, but it’s magic and I’ll take what I can get.

I send the power through my limbs, energizing exhausted muscles, numbing the pain, pulling what blood I can back into my body. I still can’t seal the wounds, though, damn it. I need to get out of here and back into the Dreamtime where I can regenerate properly, where the curse of the Legion’s knives can fall from my flesh.

Whatever. I just need to be strong enough to make some distance.

“Sorry, this is probably going to be a little humiliating,” I say quickly as I slip my arms under Ghostface and heft them up in a bridal carry.

They hiss sharply as the motion jostles the harpoon, and I try to hold in my wince as I move us carefully toward the exit without giving the supernatural sniper at the far end of the room too juicy of a target.

The cover ends eventually, though, and from here all I can do is run it. So I dig my feet into the sodden earth and kick off, running for all I’m worth, ignoring the sorcery-dulled screaming in my limbs as I run for a part of the wall that caved in long before I got around to this place. With every step, I keep my ears trained for the click of a hammer or the scuff of a bootsole. Anything that will give me a hint that I’m about to get speared like a pig.

“Going somewhere?”

My fevered blood chills at the chittering quality of the voice that emanates from everywhere and nowhere all at once just as we make the threshold of the shattered wall. Gut-instinct serves me again as I skid to a stop and leap back, flinching at the sharp, pained intake of breath from Ghostface.

A split-second later, the ground in front of us is riven apart by a half-dozen twitching, chitinous black limbs like the legs of the world’s ugliest scorpion punching through the rubble. They twitch with nauseating spasms towards us, but I’m already backpedaling away.

“Sorry!” I shout as I make a wild dive to the left, predicting the next move in this psychotic little chess game.

As it turns out, I’m right.

A gunshot report heralds the passage of the Deathslinger’s barbed harpoon flying past us with inches to spare. Ghostface lets out a brittle snarl as I hit the ground and roll, doing my best to cradle them in my arms and keep the jostling of the harpoon to a minimum.

“Sorry,” I repeat as I slide us back into cover. “I uh… I don’t think we’re getting out of this one.”

“The Thief?” Ghostface rasps weakly, their voice breaking even through the modulator of their mask.

I nod sullenly.

A faint tremor goes through the ground before I can say anything, though, and I spit another curse as I heft my ally and kick off just in time to avoid another pillar of twitching arachnoid limbs that rips out of the concrete to lash and snatch at us.

“This is getting ridiculous!” I snarl.

“Tell me about it.”

This time, the voice doesn’t ripple out of the air. It comes from the far end of the Ormond Lodge, and I freeze, fixing my eyes on the patch of shadows where I can pick out the Deathslinger casually reloading their hideous firearm.

And something else.

No… someone else.

A figure—short, slender, and unassuming stands in the deeper shadows just behind the Deathslinger, and the only thing that really stands out are their eyes.

Like cold embers of sickly teal shot through with venomous gold.

“No shit,” I mutter, laughing weakly. “So you really came here in person, huh?”

The Deathslinger takes aim but doesn’t fire, obeying some silent command from their master as the figure in the back moves slowly forward, out of the shadows, and into the dim, half-light of the Fog-drenched Trial.

“Well, you didn’t really give me much choice,” Twilight says with a sneer that looks alien on her pretty face. “Bravo, though—” she gives me a patronizingly short golf-clap “—on tearing apart my quantum lock on this little sub-dimension, that was clever.”

My mouth goes dry. This cannot be happening. For a brief, brief moment, I’m positive I’m looking at the face of my friend from beyond the long-since sealed portal to Equestria, but memory kicks me hard in the back of the head a moment later. The sleep study. Applejack—

—and the human version of Twilight Sparkle.

She looks different in this light. Less human and more… other. Her eyes are wide and unpleasantly lit with something unhinged, and her smile is just a touch too wide. Her hair is tied up in a messy bun, and every inch of her skin other than her face is covered by a ragged, high-collared lab coat stained with char and blood that drapes down to her ankles, while her hands are covered in a pair of black gloves that reflect the light in a way that twists my stomach for a reason I can’t quite put my blades on.

Regardless, all of this sums up to a single word which constitutes the only rational reaction I can imagine having in this situation.

“Horseshit.”

“Language,” Twilight replies dryly. “But yeah, I agree. This mess went from a potential win to massive frustration annoyingly fast. Originally, I was curious to see what you were capable of, and I’ll admit,” she holds up both of her hands and gives a faint shrug, “it was my call and it was a bad one. I was curious and it cost me one of my most promising subjects.”

She gestures flatly to the unconscious forms of Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle, and to Scootaloo’s bloody body. Her casual manner drags a feral growl out of me.

“Down, girl,” Twilight says with an air of disinterest. “My point is, I should have nipped this in the bud weeks ago, but I didn’t and that’s on me, I was hoping for one last solid experiment but clearly,” she gestures to the state of the Ormond Trial, “that was a mistake too, and it’s going to take me months to recoup the power I burnt on this, so consider that my lesson learned.”

“Power?” I repeat the world dully, my limbs shaking as I pull Ghostface closer. “Did you just call it power?”

Twilight raises an eyebrow.

“Yes?”

“That shit is made of human hope and despair!” I roar.

Slowly, Twilight cocks her head at me, looking less frustrated and more… curious. Her eyes, which can’t seem to settle on a color between lavender, teal, and painfully bright gold, settle on me in a way they hadn’t before. It’s like she’s taking me apart, bit by bit, with her gaze. For a moment, it’s almost like I’m back in the darkness between the Trials where the Entity does its unspeakable work, peeling its prey apart and extracting what it wants, and leaving them lesser and lesser every time.

When Twilight finally speaks, it’s in a tone of utter boredom.

“And?”

So that’s it. There really isn’t anything in there that’s anything like my friend in Equestria. Whatever there might have been probably died in the Entity’s grip for one reason or another. I can’t even fathom how she managed to steal from the Old Stain, but she clearly did, and now she acts like she has more in common with that omni-dimensional predator than she does with the human race.

I lower my head and shudder before looking back up at them. At the facsimile of my friend and the murderous Deathslinger.

“Tell me,” I say quietly as I turn to look at the eerily still Killer beside Twilight, “is that who I think it is?”

“Hm?” Twilight follows the line of my eyes and looks up at the Deathslinger. “Oh, probably,” she takes a couple of steps closer to the silent, towering figure and reaches out, “hold on babe, lemme just takes this and…”

Twilight goes up on her tip-toes in a grotesquely affectionate fashion to pluck the wide-brimmed, notched hat from the Deathslinger’s head.

Hair that should have been the color of buckwheat in the summer falls in an arrow-straight cascade of ashen blonde around a face that’s almost familiar.

I don’t know how much of Applejack is left underneath the Killer persona, but it clearly isn’t much. Her face is frozen in expressionless focus, unmoving, like a dressing-store mannequin. Eyes that were once the green of apple tree leaves are hollow floodlights of pale white luminance. If the eyes are the window to the soul, then those windows look out over an empty plain of stark white nothingness.

Twilight shakes out the hat, brushing her hand over the brim a few times to knock the dust from it.

“There we go,” she says, smiling faintly. “All clean.”

Of all things, that’s what turns my stomach the most. Before, this world’s Twilight hadn’t shown an iota of human emotion; just cold, clinical distance.

The way she treats Applejack—or rather, the Deathslinger—though, is the absolute opposite.

“She hates it when her hat gets dirty,” Twilight says softly as she tucks the article under her arm and looks back up at me. “But she wears it absolutely everywhere, so it’s kind of a silly hang-up, don’t you think?”

“Take it.” Ghostface’s voice is a pained whisper, and I flick my gaze down as they press the handle of the Lesser Knife against my chest. “Sh-She can’t get her hands on it, take it and run.”

“I can hear you, you know.”

Ghostface goes rigid, and we both look up at Twilight who’s staring at us with that flat expression back on her face. “I’m a demigod, I can hear it every time your Fog-laced lungs take a breath, and you’re right… I do want that knife.”

“I’m not leaving you,” I say firmly.

“Neither of you are leaving,” Twilight says pointedly.

It’s not fair. I did everything the best that I could. I fought as hard, I won a fight against impossible odds. We won. Only for this chittering robber baron to descend on her throne of delusion to deus ex machina it all out of existence?

Horseshit.

I lower Ghostface gently to the ground, then straighten my back, bare teeth and claws both, and step over them, bristling as I clash my fingerblades together in challenge.

“Fine!” I hiss. “You want us? Come and get us.”

The corner of Twilight’s mouth twitches up.

“Well, you know what they say,” she drawls. “If you want something done right, send your immortal, mutant girlfriend to do it herself.”

Twilight steps back and away from Applejack—no, not Applejack, that’s the Deathslinger—with a triumphant grin. Deathslinger gets me in her sights, and there’s nowhere for me to go, either I dodge or I don’t. If I dodge, maybe Ghostface takes the hit, and as much as that kills me I know we’re both dead if I don’t win this fight.

Ha… as if I even have a chance.

Well, let no one say Sunset Shimmer won’t rage against the dying of the light.

Even if it’s futile.

Deathslinger settles her finger on the trigger, breathes in, out, and on the tail of her breath—

BOOM

Twilight Sparkle’s head vanishes in a swelter of gore, and she crumples to the ground, twitching violently, and my jaw drops.

Deathslinger reacts with razor precision, back-pedaling until she’s standing over her mistress’ body, gun up and panning for threats. She twitches at some noise I can’t hear, then jerks to the side as another throaty roar barks from somewhere distant, blowing a hole through the wall behind the Deathslinger.

The moment the wood wall and intervening support beam shatters, Deathslinger drops and scoops up Twilight’s body, which is hideously regenerating its lost head—I guess massive physical trauma doesn’t apply to demigods—and bolts into cover.

From behind, the sound of boots crunching on snow approaches. I see the barrel of the massive rifle before I see its owner as they walk in with the weapon held up and out, seeking a target, but the Deathslinger is a canny creature.

“Pinche culero. Waited all that time for her to get into view and it was a waste. Should have shot the motherfucker with the gun, first.”

The familiar accent chokes me, and the scent of bloody gunsmoke and spices I’ve never figured out how to use in the right amounts fills my nose as I turn in time for Tempest Shadow to step into view. Her heavy black jacket is gone, replaced with a mottled white one for camouflage, and the rifle she’s holding is fucking enormous, and couldn’t be more different from the ancient model used by the Deathslinger; this one is sleek, black, and modern: a heavy anti-material rifle used to kill tanks.

“Temp?” I say, smiling cautiously. “You came back!”

She doesn’t reply, instead, lowering the rifle and eyeing it with annoyance for a moment before tossing it to the side. “No good at this range, not against something that can dodge like that.”

“Tempest?”

“Get out of here, Mi sol,” she says as she shrugs off the bulky white jacket.

Underneath it, she’s wearing a heavy, hacking blade strapped to the leather belt of her fatigues, and a thick, nail-ridden Louisville slugger secured across her back. Her arms are bare to the cold in her military surplus body vest, displaying her gang ink for all to see as she cards her fingers through her short, ragged hair, and pushes it out of her eyes.

“I’ll deal with them,” she says.

“The hell you will,” I snap.

A hand grips my arm, tugging me back and away from Tempest, and I look behind me to see Ghostface struggling to get to their feet, half-using me as support, half trying to pull me away from the woman that a small part of me still wants to be in love with.

“We need to go,” Ghostface says hollowly. “Now.”

“What?!” I glare at them. “Why?!”

Ghostface isn’t looking at me, though. They’re looking at Tempest, and there’s something different about the young Killer now. They’re tense and… and they’re afraid. That’s it… they’re afraid of Tempest.

And then it hits me.

Ice settles in the pit of my stomach as I turn slowly to look back at Tempest, and I swallow thickly.

“Temp,” I say slowly. “The Fog barrier surrounding Ormond… it’s down, right?”

She doesn’t answer, she just draws her blade and turns it over in hand, examining it with a flat, strained look on her face, then she grips the haft with white-knuckled force.

“Right?” I plead. “Tempest… please.”

“I tried, Mi Sol,” Tempest says without looking up. “I tried to push it away. I tried not to give in, tried to keep it locked away, but it… it got harder and harder every night… the more blood I spilled the worse it got, and the worst part is that I knew it was happening and I didn’t care.”

Finally, when she does look up at me, it’s with agony etched over her beautiful, scarred face.

“Why?” I ask quietly. “The East End… all those people.”

The agony fades into a flat, searing rage.

“Because they deserved it.”

A deep, bass thump pounds out from Tempest, rippling the air and kicking up dust. The taste of copper and ash in the air goes from cloying to choking as Tempest’s eyes darken from that familiar icy blue that used to make my heart skip beats, to a deep, angry red.

“That hurt, you miserable little INSECT!”

Twilight Sparkle tears apart a section of wall and flooring as she emerges. Gone is the nebbish human form, with all the soft mortality replaced by coiling darkness. The whole of her body is cradled in form-hugging, chitinous black armor, and shadows like a swarm of blowflies hiss and rattle around her in a toxic miasma of corruptive dark magic, with her lab coat open and flapping around her like the banner of a dead kingdom.

And her head snaps back as Tempest whirls on her heel, draws her enormous colt revolver, and puts a bullet between Twilight’s eyes, staggering her back. Another, then another, and another shot hits Twilight as Tempest advances, two more to the head and another in the chest, center mass, rocking her backward.

That’s when I see it, the reason that the two times I’ve seen Twilight in person she’s always been laced up to the neck. She’d have to be to hide a wound like that.

Cleaving Twilight open from just above her right hipbone, diagonally up her chest, and terminating under her left shoulder, is a massive rift in her body, and Fog leaks from it like poorly clotted blood. For some reason, she isn’t healing, and since she’s an order of magnitude superior to me, biologically and magically, I can only wonder… what kind of weapon can wound a god?

A gunshot echoes from beyond Twilight, and the Deathslinger’s harpoon punches into Tempest’s chest. I let out a strangled cry, but it dies in my throat as she barely staggers, bellows out a wordless snarl of rage, and drops her gun only to draw her machete and hack straight through the chain before ripping the harpoon out, leaving a gaping wound.

“Leave the monsters to kill each other, Mi sol!” Tempest’s voice is gone. No, maybe not gone, but changed. There’s a bass echo to it that no set of human vocal chords could ever hope to emulate.

“Tempest, don’t,” I beg as I take a step forward, but Ghostface’s hand grips my shoulder tighter, keeping me anchored. “You can be like Adagio and me… half in the Fog! You just have to control it!”

At those words, Tempest’s shoulders sag like the weight of the world has fallen across them. Even now, knowing what she is, I still love those shoulders. The power in them—in her—and, in that moment, I know what she’s going to say.

“I don’t want to.” Tempest shudders as her grip on her blade tightens. “I’m sorry, Mi sol, for everything. For trying to replace Mi verano with you, for trying to drown myself in you to forget her, but… but I can’t anymore, I can’t forget her like that.”

Across the room, Twilight shivers as the holes in her body seal up, pushing the shattered remains of the forty-fives that had punched into her brainpan out and onto the floor with two dull clinks as the Deathslinger finishes reloading, takes aim, and fires again.

This time, Tempest moves, twisting at the waist with inhuman reflex and snatching the harpoon from the air.

“Now, let me show you,” Tempest snarls, the air around her heating to an unbearable degree. “Let me show you the way I pray.”

Tempest wrenches the chained weapon forward, dragging the Deathslinger bodily out of cover before casting the harpoon away, gripping the collar of her vest and shirt, and tearing it open. I’ve seen her like this before, of course. Bare and beautiful as she is, covered in the gang ink of her old life. The most intricate of her tattoos, beyond the ubiquitous crowns, was the image of a saint with the face of a bleached skull across her chest.

“Santa Muerte, bendice mi odio, bendice mi ira.” She turns her palms up as red light cascades around her, and the Trial itself rocks as she tips her head back…

And roars.

“We need to go!” Ghostface wheezes. “Sh-She’s taking everything!”

I stagger back, staring at the impossibility before me. I can feel it, just like Ghostface said. The Fog inside me is trying to wrench its way out of my body. I don’t know how it happened; maybe it’s because she lasted longer in the Trials than anyone—not even I know how long she was really in there—but Tempest clearly stopped being a mere Survivor a long time ago.

Now, she’s a maelstrom of Fog, drawing it in like the event horizon of a black hole. Whole sections of the Ormond Trial are ripping apart, transmuting back to their base form of pure Fog and siphoning into the growing supernova of bloody crimson light pouring off of Tempest.

Through it all, I can hear her roar. It’s deafening and impossibly long, defying the limits of both logic and lung capacity as the sheer sound of Tempest’s manifold rage tears the world around us apart. My own Fog is betraying me, trying to sieve out from the wounds in my body and even up my throat, and it’s all I can do to scoop up Ghostface and try to pull away from the magnetic draw of Tempest’s wrath.

But I do force myself to look back, one last time.

I owe her that.

I owe her so much more for all of my failures.

The ruddy red light is sinking into Tempest’s body and taking the Fog with it, and beyond her I can see Twilight, in her twisted form, staring in comic disbelief as she clings to Applejack, holding her in place to keep her from being dragged into Tempest’s arms to, presumably, be eviscerated.

That’s when she starts to change.

Her body swells and twists, powerful muscles bulging with barbaric stature as armor of archaic bronze or brass hammers into existence around her inhuman limbs, each piece from pauldron to chestplate to tassets and down, bear the snarling faces of Marexican demons, or a grinning, death’s-head skull.

The last to go is her face, and I try to memorise it before that happens. I try to fix in my mind’s eye what she looks like. What she looked like: proud, defiant, and powerful, before the hate and rage and all of the pain of countless Trials consumed her soul.

Then it’s gone. Her face is swallowed by that terrible mask I saw back in the alley—a grinning skull painted in swirling blacks and reds solidifies as her hair effervesces into a wild mane of burning red strands that leak from her as though her body can’t contain its own fury.

The roar fades, replaced with heavy, ursine breathing. The heavy machete is now a massive, thick, chopping blade of rough-cut volcanic glass, and the baseball bat filled with nails has reshaped into that half-a-tree club that’s now studded with cruelly notched wedges of obsidian.

“Tempest.” I sob her name, but she doesn’t turn. She doesn’t react. This thing only has eyes for the interlopers. The invading predators. Finally, I say the only thing left to say: “Tempest, I’m so sorry.”

I pull Ghostface back into my arms and turn, sprinting away on the heels of Twilight cursing viciously, only for her voice to be drowned out by a bestial roar.

I’m leaving behind so much blood that even in my Killer form my vision is starting to swim by the time I get to the edge of the forest. I stagger through the trees, clutching on to Ghostface; holding them up is, ironically, just about the only thing keeping me going.

It would be so much easier not to.

To go back to the lodge and let myself get lost with whatever is left of Tempest Shadow.

But I can’t. Even if Ghostface is my enemy, or will be eventually, they pushed me out of the way, they saved me, even if it makes no sense, they still did it. I owe it to them to get them out of here because Sunset Shimmer always breaks even.

Yeah, right.

What a fucking joke.

The moment we breach the Fog barrier of Ormond it’s like I can finally breathe again, and I fall to my knees as the Dreamtime hits me like a freight train. My realm. My home. Suddenly it’s so close that I can taste it, and I set Ghostface down on the little forest path we emerged on.

“Stay still,” I say as I lean them against a tree. “Time to get that thing out.”

Ghostface looks down at the harpoon, then back up at me.

“I thought you said—”

“Do you trust me?” I ask, cutting them off before they can argue.

Again, I wish I could see under their mask. I wish I could see what kind of face they’re wearing while they stare at me. The answer to that question should obviously be no, but we both know that isn’t true. Back in Ormond, we fought back to back like we’d been doing it for years.

“Yeah,” they say after a long moment. “I trust you.”

I nod, then put a hand on the ragged, broken haft of the harpoon, grip it gently… and vanish.

Unlike what I was doing in the Trials, flickering briefly between here and there, real and dream, this time I step fully into the Dreamtime and I take the harpoon with me.

Being back here is like being drunk. I breathe in the free flow of power from the Dream and let it cover up the agony of my wounds—the physical ones, and the others. The notion of returning to the Real is agonizing, but I know that I have to. Ghostface might be free of the Deathslinger’s harpoon, but they’re still wounded. I can’t just leave them in the middle of the mountains.

They’d probably be fine, but…

I linger a few breaths longer than I strictly have to before stepping back into the Real and onto the forest path, and the pain of my wounds hits me all over again. It’ll keep doing that til I shed my Killer shape, til I rest my power and let myself regenerate a little.

“Ow,” Ghostface grumbles as I toss the harpoon away.

“Better than leaving it in,” I say. “Hopefully, without it being stuck in you, your connection to the Old Stain can start sealing up those wounds.”

“What about you?” Ghostface asks as I drop down beside them and rest my head against the trunk of the same broad tree. “Are you… are you okay?”

Am I okay?

Scootaloo is dead because I dragged her into a hell of my own making, and her friends aren’t much better off. Even better, because of me, this whole damn city is infected with the Fog, and it’s poisoning everything in it with death and murder.

Am I okay?

The girl I once thought I loved has more blood on her hands than I can literally count. Rivers of it, maybe. She’s a Killer, and worse, she doesn’t care. She’s so strong, too, that I’m not sure even the Thief has a chance of yoking that thing to her will, and for some reason the notion of her being controlled by the Thief is actually less terrifying than her being totally unbound.

She’s a living maelstrom of Fog and fury and insanity, and I have no idea how much of her mind is even left, and if it is there, how much of Tempest there is.

So… am I okay?

“Yeah,” I say as I shed my Killer form, close my eyes, and blow out a breath.

“I’m just fine.”

I’m falling through darkness for what feels like an eternity. There’s nothing but endless shadows all around me, twisting and writhing with unspeakable life—no, not life, existence, maybe. It’s it… him… the Entity, the Father, the Old Stain. A thousand and one names for a single being.

All I can hear is that chittering of arachnoid legs, contriving to seem both pleased and disappointed in me at once.

I can feel the pull of the Fog. The welcome taste of copper and ash rests easily on my tongue as my falling slows. Where have I felt this before? This feeling of weightless eternity. Of agonizingly slow freefall?

Ah, that’s right.

The Trials.

When you get taken into the dark to be peeled apart, molecule by molecule, bone by bone, strip by bloody strip of flesh, and all is said and done, when the Entity finally lets you go, you fall.

And fall.

And fall.

Until finally your feet find purchase by the warmth of the campfire, your little bastion of false hopes where the lost and the damned huddle together for warmth until they’re dragged into the shadows to be hunted by the devil they know.

Then the darkness shakes and shudders, and suddenly light splits through it, painful as a forge flame against my skin and—

My eyes snap open and it takes me a moment to focus on the snowy forest around me. I can taste it, the ice and the cold dirt of the mountain, and… I look to my side, blinking blearily at the dark-gloved hand on my shoulder.

I follow the hand to the wrist, then the arm, and up into the face of a silently screaming ghost as its owner kneels beside me. Despite being objectively terrifying, their presence is somehow comforting.

“Did… I fall asleep?”

For a little while.

“For a little while.”

My heart catches in my chest at the sudden, overwhelming sense of deja vu, and it takes me a long moment to settle again before I can finally push myself up from where I'm lying on my side.

“Ow.”

I groan as my entire body protests the motion and I drop back onto the cold ground.

My Killer skin and my human mask may look different, but they share the same meat, as was evidenced by the fact that when I got repeatedly stabbed during my astral jaunt it got reflected over onto my dreaming, physical body. No matter how strong I am, I just put my whole body and every inch of my magic through the wringer. I have fucked around and will probably spend the next month ‘finding out’.

“Ugh, okay, let’s… let’s try this dance again,” I grumble as I make a second, more successful attempt at getting to my knees, albeit shakily, before looking up at my companion. “How’s the shoulder?”

Ghostface makes a point of looking at the spot where they’d suffered their worst wound. The fabric of their fitted outfit and robes has sealed up, and they roll their shoulder stiffly.

“Better,” they reply in that half-tone crackle of modulation. “You were right, as soon as we got the harpoon out, it started to seal up.”

“Yeah, perks of having a direct conduit to the Old Stain himself,” I say as I crack my neck. “It’s gonna take me a little longer.”

I look down at myself, at my disguise, my leather jacket and teeshirt over soft, sliceable amber skin, and my flimsy human digits. I’m stuck like this for now. If I pull out my Killer shape it’ll bring a boatload of pain and cursed wounds with it. To be honest, I don’t even know how long it will take to heal properly. I’ve never been hurt that badly before.

Written’s Quill, I hate being patient.

“You could have it too,” Ghostface says casually. “Right now, if you want… Father wants you back.”

I grimace. “Yeah, no… the old man and I? We’ve got a few key differences of opinion that are kind of irreconcilable vis a vis humans as a food source.”

“It’s not like that.”

Ghostface turns and sits back down beside me as they pull out the Lesser Knife and start turning it over slowly in their hands.

“You forget, I’ve been there,” I say flatly. “I know what it’s like.”

They snort out an oddly… bitter sound.

“Do you?” they ask softly.

I cock my head, narrowing my eyes at them as they turn to face me with their fingers still playing along the smooth bone handle and Fog-forged metal of the blade.

“Tell me, Nightmare, if you had to, what would you choose? A world with false hope? Or a world with no hope at all?”

That… isn’t what I expected. I’d expected them to defend their ‘Father’ or to argue the point at least, not pose a pseudo-philosophical moral quandary to me. Okay, I guess I’ll follow this. I chew on the question for a moment, then shake my head as I hit a wall.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I say finally.

Ghostface cocks their head curiously.

“How do you mean?”

I gesture out to the world around us. “The point of hope is that we don’t know what’s going to happen but we try to make things better. False hope would assume that some part of us knows that there’s no way to improve things, so if you ask me what I’d choose between a world with no hope, and a world with false hope, I’d say the only difference between the two is how much the denizens are lying to themselves.”

They’re silent for a long moment, then—

“Typical.”

Ghostface looks away, a quiet scoff leaving them as they stand up and brush off their robes, knocking some splinters and snow loose, and as much as I want to spit that pithy-sounding answer back at them, the sheer exhaustion in that single word actually knocks the wind out of me.

I scramble to my feet as they start walking into the forest, back towards Ormond.

“Hey!” I shout, my aching limbs fighting me every step of the way as I try to catch up with them. “Two things! One, what’s ‘typical’ supposed to mean, and two, are you actually going back there?!”

They pause long enough for me to catch up, and shoot a glance over their shoulder that, despite belonging to an expressionless, masked face, feels drenched with a kind of weary venom.

“Firstly, typical,” they start quietly, “because not all of us are born brave, brilliant, and beautiful, and sometimes, false hope is the best we get. Secondly, yeah, I am, the Fog barrier dropped almost an hour ago.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” I say, shooting them a smirk that I almost feel, but it falls away a moment later.

“What if…” I start, biting my lip as I do.

What if she’s still there. Is what I want to ask. If Tempest is there? Will she be the monster? The Oni? Will she be human? If she is, will she even be sane? She somehow forced her own evolution into a Killer, saturating herself in Fog and blood until she mutated into that thing.

It lacks any of the Entity’s fine touches. There’s nothing graceful about the Killer that Tempest became. There’s none of the unsettlingly artistic flair the Old Stain likes to employ in his creations.

Just brute, savage force.

I try not to think too hard about what that says of Tempest’s mind and soul when she changed, which just leads me down the rabbit hole of: when did she change? When was the first time? What triggered it? Why would she throw everything away just to drown herself in blood all over again despite having finally escaped the hellish Trials?

I guess that’s the part that kills me.

After everything we went through… why?

“We’ll leave if they’re still there, but I’d bet the Thief and her handler bolted, with your friend in hot pursuit,” Ghostface says.

My friend? Isn’t that a painfully bitter concept?

“My friend is dead,” I say hollowly. “She just doesn’t know it yet.”

Ghostface treats me to another over-the-shoulder side-eye, then shrugs as they continue to make their way through the undergrowth.

“Father will find her sooner or later,” Ghostface says.

Oh and isn’t that a cheerful thought. All that time, all that effort to get her out, and Tempest just walks right back into the Old Stain’s spidery embrace with a skull-faced grin; the only difference is that this time she’s no different from Billy or the Shape.

And yet, as much as I hate it. As much as it galls me…

“Yeah,” I say softly. “I hope so.”

…for trying to replace Mi verano with you…

Mi verano. My Summer. Summer Wind, most lately known as ‘The Hag’, and the love of Tempest’s life, that she lost in the worst possible way. Now, at least, maybe they can be together.

I look to find Ghostface staring at me again, and I scowl at them before picking up the pace and pushing past, forging our way back to Ormond.

If it was a ruin before, now it’s practically demolished. Half of the Lodge itself is caved in, torn apart by whatever running battle happened between the Thief and her Deathslinger, and the monster that Tempest became.

I’ll be surprised if this structure lasts the winter. Most likely, it’ll fall in on itself in the next few days, or maybe hours. There can’t be that many load-bearing columns left, and ones that are can’t possibly be in good condition.

I think about all of this to distract myself. Maybe it’s not healthy, but at least I’m aware of it, and knowing is half the battle, right?

And a battle only half-fought is lost.

Well, at least I’m trying.

To my surprise, Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle are, more or less, where we left them; a little battered and covered in some light detritus, but otherwise unconscious and alive. Maybe since the Killers hunt by Fog, neither the Deathslinger nor the Oni could really detect them, and I’ll hazard a guess that Miss Twilight had bigger things to worry about than her now Fogless, half-breed rejects.

And naturally, Scootaloo hasn’t moved either.

Her small, malnourished, and broken body is right on the filthy concrete where I dropped it.

We tend to the living before the dead. Between the two of us, we clear away the rubble from Apple Bloom and Sweetie, and Ghostface even turns up a mattress that’s been shoved into the corner for us to lay them on. It’s a little worse for the wear, but aren’t we all?

Once the two living girls aren’t half-buried, we get to the grim work. It won’t be easy, especially with the hard-packed earth around here, but I’m not leaving til it’s done, so Ghostface and I split up to search the grounds for something that might make the work a little easier.

Unsurprisingly, it’s my ‘partner’ who turns up the prize.

“I found some shovels in a shed nearby,” Ghostface says as they walk back into the Lodge with two of the tools slung over a shoulder.

I hadn’t gotten much done.

“Cool,” I say softly, “sorry I… I keep spacing out.”

It’s so incongruous, seeing them like this. All dark and foreboding, with that malformed mask covering their face, and yet… they act so painfully human most of the time.

Right up until they draw that knife.

The Lesser Knife.

“It’s okay.” They pass me one of the shovels, which I take gratefully. “It’s been a long day.”

I snort. “That’s a word for it.”

We move in comfortable silence; I already picked out a spot in the middle of one of the few copses of trees the original workers never got around to clearing. It has a nice flat space between a few of the trees that looks nice enough, and I owe Scootaloo at least that much.

Truthfully, I owe her a lot more.

I break the ground first, and the shovel bites only inches into the dense, frozen earth. It’s brutal, grueling work, and half the time it feels like the pair of us are only managing a few inches at a time. My body already hurts, and the ache is being driven deeper with every meager scoop of dirt and rock.

But I don’t complain.

I deserve this.

What surprises me is that Ghostface doesn’t complain either.

They just dig with a quiet, stolid diligence that makes me think they’ve done work like this before. Or maybe they’re just used to enduring things. Somehow, I get the feeling it’s the latter. There’s no reason I can point to that makes me certain of that, but all the same… I am.

Four hours later, I’m panting, practically frostbitten, I ache in places I didn’t even know I had, and my palms are bleeding, but the hole is dug, and that’s all that matters.

“I’ll get—”

“No.” I cut them off as I stand, my legs trembling with the effort. “I… just, let me do it, okay?”

Ghostface watches me with the strangely expressive, unmoving mask for a moment, then nods.

I toss the shovel to the ground and make my way into the Lodge. It’s not far, but feels like the length of a pilgrimage, and by the time I stop next to Scootaloo’s body, I feel like I’m about to fall apart.

Sagging down to my knees, I slowly fit my bleeding hands and shaking arms underneath her, and lift her up, cradling her against me. She's so light that it’s barely an effort.

My arms are shaking, and not all of it is from the strain and the cold. But I endure it because I deserve it. Because I have to. Because someone has to. Because Scootaloo deserves to have someone endure it. So I carry her light, empty shell through the Lodge, out the shattered hole in the wall, and into the lightly falling snow.

It’s strangely poetic, to be carrying a corpse to a grave where a figure in black with a face like death is waiting with a shovel in hand, like some kind of sick oil painting.

I stop in front of the grave, and my arms and legs are both about to give out, but I push through, and I don’t know how to properly express to Ghostface how grateful I am that they don’t try to help me.

All I can do is nod silently to them as I get leadenly to my knees, sling my feet over the edge, and gently lower myself into the grave with Scootaloo in my arms. I won’t just drop her into a six-foot hole like a sack of garbage. I can at least have the good grace to set her down softly after everything I did to her.

I take a moment to tug her shirt straight, do up her hoodie and vest, and lay out her hair a little more neatly. I know it doesn’t mean anything since we’re about to dump half a ton of dirt on her, but… but I guess I just don’t know what else to do. Ghostface’s dark glove swings down, and I give Scootaloo one more apologetic look before reaching up to take their hand and let them lever me back up and out of the grave

My hands sting horribly by the time we finish filling in the grave at the base of one of the larger, less gnarled trees, and pat the earth flat with the back of the shovel.

“Thank you for this,” I say, as I pass the now-bloodstained shovel back to Ghostface. “Really… thank you.”

They don’t say anything. They just nod, and I’m incredibly grateful for that too as I turn back to Scootaloo’s grave.

“I’m sorry,” I say quietly as I kneel in the dirt. “I… I know it doesn’t mean anything anymore, but I’m sorry. This all just—” a sob cracks through my voice “—just… got so out of hand.”

Thick, hot tears start falling out of nowhere, and Ghostface puts a hand on my shoulder but I barely feel it. All I can do is sob as something ugly and wretched wells up from my gut past my throat.

“I never meant to hurt everyone so badly…” My chest is so tight it feels like it’s caving in on itself. “And I’m so sorry I did this. I’m sorry I keep coming back, I really am just a nightmare. I’m everyone’s worst nightmare and I just won’t… won’t fucking die.”

I bow my head, and any words I had left wither into dust on my tongue as I shake with dry, empty whimpers.

“Oh God, but I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself king of infinite space—” Ghostface’s voice crackles eerily in the darkening winter evening, and I look up to find them staring down at me “—were it not that I have bad dreams.”

Their voice trails off and, to my surprise, they look almost sheepish.

“It’s—”

“Hamlet,” I say. “That’s from Hamlet, right?”

They nod, and I find myself laughing bitterly. Hamlet, a tragedy where pretty much everyone dies in the end. How appropriate.

But it helps, even if I don’t know why.

With what little energy I still have left, I stand, move to the base of the tree that serves as Scootaloo’s grave marker, and hold out my hand. It takes more focus than it ever has before, but slowly, my blades slip out from the tips of my fingers, dribbling blood from my hand into the tainted soil of Ormond as the flesh of my fingers and knuckles turns red, and the veins ice over to wintery blue.

The process is painstaking because I don’t want to make a mistake, but I manage it with more grace than I probably have a right to expect given the day I’ve had.

Here Lies Scootaloo

—May she rest easy and sleep—

—And in this sleep what dreams may come will be sweet—

—For she sleeps where no nightmares may reach her—

“There,” I say, pulling my blades away from the now-etched treebark. “Much better.”

I stand with help from Ghostface who gets an arm under me, and I have to half-hobble away while leaning the lion’s share of my weight on the shoulders of the Killer a dark god sent to damn my soul.

“Will you take me home?” I ask as they draw out their blade and make a slicing motion in the air, wounding the air as Fog begins to spill out.

“Where’s home?” they ask.

I know they know where my apartment is. That’s not what they’re asking. I hate that my answer to that question comes with hesitation.

“Second room on the left,” I say quietly.

Ghostface nods faintly, then steps through. I hear them say something else though, as we pass into the Fog. I’m not sure if they meant for me to hear it or not. I think they didn’t.

But I heard them whisper it under their breath so softly, that there was barely a crackle from their modulator.

It was two words.

“For now.”

Yeah… ‘for now’.

Author's Note

Frustration and fury, more destructive than a hundred cannons.

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