Dead by Midnight

by I-A-M

Rating: mature
Tags: Violence, Crossover, Sunset Shimmer, Gore, Dazzlings, Dark, Death, Sour Sweet, Tempest Shadow, Mystery, Horror, Starlight Glimmer, Equestria Girls
Length: 140363

Two years after they were taken, two years after they escaped, the Fog has returned to Canterlot and with it, murders and a brand new threat.

Two years after they were taken, two years after they escaped, the Fog has returned to Canterlot and with it, murders and a brand new threat.

Sunset found her way back a year after saving her friends, and enemies, from the clutches of the Entity, and sacrificing herself. In the process of escaping, she discovered that someone had attacked the Entity and stolen its dark magic. Now, a year later, the city of Canterlot is beset by a rash of murders that have no motive and leave no evidence.

With her old crew on her side along with a few new friends, Sunset is determined to carve the Fog out of the streets of Canterlot and make herself the thief's worst Nightmare.

And if she's lucky she'll do it without losing anyone.

Part of the Dead by Sunset main continuity. Find the group Here.

Cover art by the talented Irina.

Published 2020-11-10 21:20:01 UTC
Last updated 2021-04-15 01:01:37 UTC

1.1

—wake up.

“Mi sol?”

I let out a shuddering breath as I turn my head to face Tempest who’s still lying beside me. Her arms are curled protectively around my body, and I’m pressed hard against her chest, clutching at her with desperate strength.

Rather than answer, I reach a hand up to run my fingers over her cheek before leaning in to press my lips to hers.

“I have new cousins,” I say softly as I pull back, and Tempest grimaces.

Tempest Shadow isn’t exactly beautiful by classical standards, although I suppose beauty is a matter of opinion. She’s powerful, and I’ve always found power to be beautiful. The former gangbanger is towering and broad, with amazonian stature. Her fuchsia hair is hacked short into a crude mohawk that’s currently hanging loose over the shaved sides of her head, matching her deep, mulberry complexion nicely.

She bears the tattoos and scars of her former profession proudly. Her body is covered in the marks and symbols of her old allegiance to the Storm Kings, and their brutal methods. Scars twist around her body with faded lines and raised slashes of rough tissue across her back, sides, and arms.

Over the past year I’ve learned to identify a lot of different types of wounds, and Tempest has quite a collection.

“Mierde, so el Bandito figured it out, huh?” Tempest sat up and pulled me up with her. My limbs were still a little numb, I hadn’t fully re-engaged with my body yet. “Now what?”

“Now we figure out how many there are,” Aria says from the other side of the room.

The middle sister of the Siren’s is resting in one of the easy chairs of our apartment with a grave look on her face. Aria has aged a little since the Trials of the Entity. Apparently her immortality, and that of her sisters, had run its course with their loss at the Battle of the Bands, and without their full magic they weren’t able to rebuild the spell that created it.

Under normal circumstances that would mean all three are now functionally human.

The flatulent minotaur in the room, however, is that Adagio and Sonata are still technically Killers like me, Priests of the Entity, and none of us are sure if we even can die. We can be injured, but we have no idea what dying will entail assuming it's even possible. It may mean we die for good, or we might snap back into the Entity’s clutches.

I'd take death over that second option, personally.

Two years have passed and it's still hard to know if Adagio and Sonata are aging or not. Time will eventually tell. If they aren't aging, and that will answer our question at least in part but that's a long time coming.

“I saw them, then.” I hate admitting it, I had hoped that the other voices I’d heard back in that vision had just been supporting mortals, but that was looking less and less likely.

“Shit,” Aria flips the knife in her hand almost compulsively, turning it over and over as she glares out the window. “Talk to me, Red.”

“There's three, and they’re basically human,” I turn my mind back to the vision, trying to hold onto it fully. It’s hard, though… they’re not my memories and my mind knows it, so I’m remembering it second-hand which ironically is not unlike trying to recall a dream. “One of them is short, or at least average height, and they were wearing a hoodie. They had a mask on too, like a cheap plaster mask with crude paint daubed onto it to make a face, and they use knives, or other crude cutting weapons.”

“Multiple Fogborn Killers, and identical?” Aria asks bitterly as she pulls a hunting knife from its sheath at her hip, she’s never without a weapon to defend herself nowadays, which I get. “I’ve never heard of something like that, but that means we’re not dealing with some punk human slasher now, we could be dealing with a fucking army of them running around Canterlot.”

“What of powers?” Tempest voices the question we’re all thinking as she stands and pulls on a sweater. “What can they do, Mi sol?”

“I… I’m not a hundred percent sure,” I admit, thinking back to their almost feral movements. “They’re crazy-fast, it’s like they fly into a rage and come sprinting at you full-bore… there’s no subtlety to it, so I’m guessing it’s a bare-bones, high-grade physical enhancement.”

“There’s a virtue to simplicity, Red,” Aria sheathes the knife and sighs. “Okay so, let’s assume you’re right… that means they’re going to be super fast, stupid strong, and probably have enhanced perceptions, right?”

“That’s the usual kit,” I say. “Physical enhancement contains a basic battery of enchantments that aren’t terribly complicated but are definitely effective.”

“But there’s always a catch,” Tempest crosses her arms and furrows her brow, and I nod my agreement.

There is always a catch with a Killer. Their powers are double-edged blades. Adagio and her supernaturally effective hatchets are balanced by her compulsion to hum that lullaby, and I noticed during the Trials she wasn’t quite as fast as some of the others. The Wraith can't attack while he's shrouded, the Shape compulsively stalks his prey before descending on them, and there are a variety of others.

“Time limit.” As I say the words I know I’ve hit the nail on the head. “Physical enhancement is potent but if it’s not attached to something sturdy like, say, a piece of equipment, and just layered onto a person, then it wears them down…” I think back to what I saw in the vision, and how the Killer had spasmed and screamed. “They can’t maintain their rage for very long, and when it runs its course it claps back on them hard.”

“The physical body can only take so much strain.” Aria’s smirk twists her face up and I smile back at her. “Okay… that’s not bad, but if there’s more than one…”

“The Entity needed hope to fuel its powers,” I sigh and glance out the window at the rain. Autumn had come grudgingly to Canterlot, but when it arrived it brought storms. “I think we can safely assume the Thief has to use the same source, at least for now… and they don’t seem to have very good control over their Killers. In the memories I witnessed, I saw them kill the victim with their own hands, not hook them.”

“Then the thief probably didn’t get much from it,” Aria lets out a harsh, bitter laugh. “Not that it does the vic any good.”

It certainly doesn’t.

“Keep an eye on the morgue records,” I didn’t really need to tell Aria that, but she nods anyway. “If any more bodies come in we need to know if they have wounds inflicted by the hooks… that’s when it’ll be a real problem.”

“You don’t think we’ll catch them beforehand?” Tempest looks a little angry at the prospect.

“Assume the worst,” I say, giving her an apologetic look. “We’ll do our best, but these assholes have been evading us for eight months.”

I get up and walk over to the window to look down over the city. We're on the seventh floor of a cheap apartment complex, one of dozens in the Commons, and Tempest and I had been sharing it with Starlight and Sour Sweet since I got back a year ago. Aria had been living with us too, but she moved out and into her girlfriend’s place a little over six months ago.

In the year since my return, and the two years since Exodus Night as everyone apparently named it, when I managed to eject all the others out of my disintegrating Trial realm and send them back home, so much has changed.

So much so that I can't help a sense of disconnection from the world at large.

Thanks to Tempest’s friend, Grubber, I managed to get a new identity fabricated, at least.

Now I work the night shift under the name ‘Scarlet Dream’ in a sleep clinic that operates out of the medical offices beneath Canterlot General. I’m good at my job, not necessarily because I understand sleep medicine but because even when I’m awake and ‘human’ I can manipulate sleeping minds.

It also keeps me close to Aria with whom I’ve developed a strong friendship, for which I am still incredibly grateful.

“Any news about the disappearances?” I hate thinking about them, but…

“No,” Aria shakes her head ruefully. “Not since the last one went missing.”

“How many so far?” I grimace as the words pass my lips. I don’t really want a reminder but I need to know.

Aria turns to Tempest, who shares my grim expression.

“At last count,” she began, and I could see the mental calculations happening in her mind, “we’re at nine former Wondercolts confirmed missing.”

Ever since I found out a couple had gone missing months back, I started keeping an eye on them. I’m not sure why, masochistic self-hatred maybe? Or maybe I’m just obsessed. All I know is that they’ve been slowly vanishing from the world.

Lyra, her girlfriend Bon Bon disappeared a month ago. Microchip, Tree Hugger, and Bulk Biceps a month prior to that. Flash Sentry, for whom I still hated myself over how I used to treat him, a week before them. Hoops, Score, and Dumbbell had gone missing on a camping trip just a week prior to Flash vanishing.

There are few other lengthy absence marks I was able to turn up, but nothing I could pin down as certain: a girl with no school photo, a local and chronically truant bully named Gilda, and a couple of others.

My guess is that the Entity is reaping a harvest of souls to try and make up for whatever it had lost to the Thief. Although why it's targeting my old high school acquaintances I don't know. Although the grimmer possibility is that one or more of them might have fallen victim to one of the serial killers, or even the Legion I suppose.

Either way, the Entity was definitely taking some of them at least. Maybe because all of the above had been involved in the Anon-A-Miss scandal in one way or another? Of course, those were just the ones we knew about. Canterlot is a huge city, there could be any number of other people who vanished.

As for me? Well… as far as anyone beyond my small circle of friends knows, Sunset Shimmer is extremely dead.

More accurately, as far as they know I killed myself.

Even Princess Twilight is still under that impression since the Journal is now just a chunk of corrupted black crystal stuffed in a lead box and buried in a sanctified graveyard beside a church in the Commons.

In fairness, technically I did kill myself, it just didn’t take thanks to the Old Stain sticking its chitinous claws into matters.

It isn't my fault I got tormented to the point of suicide, only for everyone to feel guilty after it turned out I was innocent. It isn't my fault that that feeling is probably what drew the Entity’s hunters to them. I owe them nothing! I certainly didn’t owe it to anyone to publicly come back from the dead just so they can soothe their own rotten consciences.

It… it's not my fault.

It's not.

A pair of strong arms circle around me, and a rigid tension ripples through my arms, setting my fingers to twitching.

“Mi Sol?”

“I’m fine,” I snap, extricating myself from Tempest’s arms and moving away on shaky legs. “What’s our next move, Ari’?”

The former Siren gives me a level look which I studiously ignore before answering me.

“Good question,” Aria’s reply is stony. “Without a solid lead on these new Killers we’re stuck waiting for the next murder.”

“Not good enough!” I snarl the words out, then bite my tongue and step back. “Sorry… I’m just…”

“No pasa nada, Mi Sol,” Tempest tangles her fingers into my hair, teasing out the knots that had formed there while I slept. “You can’t win every fight, Shimmer, hell, sometimes you can’t even win most of them.”

“Just the ones that matter,” I say softly. “So long as I can win those… but we’re losing people left and right.”

Everything is going wrong, we're playing catch up in the bloodiest game imaginable and are no closer to actually pinning down these new Killers than we had been when the murders first started. The best we can say is that now we know we’re chasing multiple murderous psychopaths instead just a singular one.

“Anything from 'Dagi?” I glance at Aria who just shakes her head.

“Damn it.” I lean back against Tempest and mull over our situation for a while as Aria spins the knife on her palm and Tempest continues to dote on my messy hair.

“Gotta get going soon, Red,” Aria says after almost twenty minutes. “My shift is coming up, and so is yours.”

“Yeah, yeah, gimme a minute.” I grab a pair of clean scrubs from the ground by the bed and kneel to pull them on lower half.

They’re not halfway up before I feel Tempest give my ass a playful swat.

I pause and cast a withering glare over my shoulder at the Marexican woman who's sat back down on our bed and now has her hands crossed languidly behind her head and as she relaxes against the headboard.

“Did you expect me to ignore you, Mi Sol?” She asks cheekily.

I chuckle, then shake my head and continue pulling on my clothes. They’re nothing fashionable, but I found a brand of scrubs that was at least decently comfy. That was important in a job like this, that and a pair of shoes with good insoles.

“Oy, ready to go, hot stuff?” Aria calls from the kitchen.

"Yes, mom, just lemme get my face on,” I growl as I pull my shoes on, tie my hair back in a loose tail, and then go to the bathroom.

I pop open my contacts case and slip on my lenses. They’re simple colored lenses that turn my normally bright cyan eyes a watery gray, and once they’re in place I give my hair a quick once over at the roots. I’d dyed the gold a color of red that was a few shades deeper than the rest of my hair.

It still matches up nicely which doesn't surprise me. Adagio just redid the dye job about a week ago, but I still have to be careful not to let the roots show too much in case I run into an ‘old friend’, which basically amounts to anyone who knew me back in my Wondercolt days.

I finish the look off with a layer of foundation to change the lines of my face a little, another trick ‘Dagi showed me, before pulling a ball cap on over my head and stepping out of the bathroom as Aria emerges from the kitchen with half of a hot pocket hanging from her mouth, a pair of half-moon glasses perched on her nose, and her white doctor’s coat over one arm.

It’s strange how professional Aria looks now. She looks like an actual doctor when she’s got all of her shit together.

Two years ago, give or take a month, she had been a miserable, immortal asshole with too much magic and violent streak a mile wide. Now, after spending Quill only knows how long in the Entity’s clutches, and having spent a solid year in the Emergency Department of Canterlot General, she’s mellowed out considerably.

Her girlfriend probably had something to do with that, though.

Aria mumbles something incoherent around her hot pocket and nods for me to follow. I get a few steps out before Tempest’s powerful arms weave around my waist and she pulls me back.

“Going somewhere, Mi Sol?” Tempest grins as she nuzzles against the back of my neck.

“To work, you slob,” I say, but I lean into her touch.

Her affection helps keep me grounded. Maybe because it’s a feeling no fully-fledged Killer can ever truly understand. I can’t imagine a creature like the Trapper even conceiving of the emotions tied to something like what exists between Tempest and I.

Is it love?

Maybe.

Back in the Trials, when everything was do or die, it felt simple and definite. Now, though, after a year of being together, I've been starting to wonder if I even know what that word really means. I think that I love her, and I think that she loves me, but I don’t know for sure.

Maybe that’s because a part of me is a Killer. One of the Entity’s Fogborn priests. Or maybe it’s because at my heart I’m still a broken, traumatized little filly who doesn’t trust anything that even smells of love and affection because those things have been the source of all my worst pain and anguish in life.

Regardless, I lean up to brush a kiss along Tempest’s sharp, powerful jawline before peeling out of her grip. It's a little gratifying that her fingers stay tense on my sides and hips for a moment before letting me go.

I don’t know about love, but I know that Tempest cares deeply about me, and I feel the same. I would die for her, just as I would die for any of my ‘sisters’ who stand with me, but it’s Tempest’s touch and scent and voice that brings me back from the Dreamtime and keeps me from wandering too far.

Maybe that’s the closest someone like me gets to love.

“You coming, Red?” Aria says from the door, watching me with a single eyebrow crooked up the ceiling.

“Take care of yourself, Mi Sol,” Tempest presses her forehead to mine briefly, and I nod.

Then I turn, step out of Tempest’s arms, and follow Aria out into the night to start our respective shifts while we wait for another murder to happen, and show us who these new Killers truly are.

Author's Note

Slowly, gently. This is how a life is taken.

If you like my work, please consider supporting me on Patreon!

1.2

Canterlot General Hospital is a goliath of a building. It and its associated medical offices squat belligerently over better than a dozen city blocks due north of the heart of downtown and the main hospital towers ten stories up and another four down.

The sleep clinic occupies a set of three adjacent offices on the first basement level of the hospital, and while it’s lively enough in the daytime, the night consists pretty much entirely of me, and a janitor who swings in every couple of hours to bitch about whoever was the last patient to shit the bed.

Literally.

Honestly, the custodial staff of the hospital do not get paid enough, in my humble opinion.

“—so I tell the nurse, if you’re gonna prescribe the poor bitch laxatives don’t put’er back in bed, just glue’r to the goddamn commode!” Wiseline barks as he leans against the wall, and a laugh escapes me against my better judgment.

Laughing at Wiseline’s raunchy stories only encourages him. I can't really help it, though. He's genuinely a funny guy. Maybe not conventionally attractive; being short and stout, with ashen blonde hair and a pastel-green complexion, but I can tell how he’s stayed married for twelve years. A girl can fall for a lot worse than a guy who makes her laugh.

Plus, he's smarter than most people give him credit for. I asked him once why he stuck around as a janitor rather than doing something more fulfilling and his answer was about what you’d expect.

‘Cuz I got a union, kid.’

“I know I just got in, but I’m supposed to eat at some point tonight,” I say. “I’d rather not go back to my girlfriend starving because of all the code browns I had to hear about.”

“Lemme tell ya, Scar,” Wiseline smirks around his reply, “never get inta my line’a work, you’ll never look at corn the same way again.”

“A~nd that’s me tapping out.” I turn pointedly back to my desk and ignore the laughter that spills out from Wiseline as he leaves me to my own devices.

I chuckle quietly as I boot up the computer and wait for it to slowly chug to life, then type in my credentials and wait another agonising ten minutes for that to load. There aren’t usually more than one or two appointments to keep, but I still wish we still had a paper ledger I could look over rather than having to wait the near half-hour it takes for the technological dinosaur I’m forced to use to rouse itself.

“Alright, let’s see who’s on the docket.”

Either a perk or danger of working alone for eight hours at a time in the dead of night is that I end up talking to myself a lot.

It’s just as I open the scheduling software that I’m distracted by two sounds. The first is a light and slightly nervous knocking at the door, and the second is a voice.

“Uh, pardon me, but is this the sleep clinic?” A tired but familiar drawl sends a chill up my spine as I read the one name on the schedule for tonight.

Jacqueline Apple

It takes all of my considerable skill as an actress not to sprint for literally anywhere but here. Instead, I stare straight forward at the screen and school my voice to a slightly lower register.

“This is the right place, Miss Apple, come on in,” I say in a passable alto. “Just take a seat on the couch and I’ll get your check-in papers.”

“Uhm, much obliged.”

The heavy tread of Applejack's work boots thud against the floor as she makes her way over to the waiting couch to sit down. I dare a glance up at her the moment I think it’s safe, just enough to examine her critically for a moment, at least, and I’m surprised by what I see. The lines of her face are drawn tight, there are awful bags under her candy-apple green eyes, and her face is far paler than I remember.

There’s also a weight to her I don’t recall being there two years ago. Her shoulders hang like they’re bearing full saddlebags across them, and her familiar, straight-backed pride is bent somewhat, and it shows in her posture.

Other than that, though, she looks much like I remember. Her long golden hair the color of buckwheat is kept in line by a hair tie and a beat up old cowboy hat that belonged to her father. I know it’s the same one because I recognise some of the little knicks and scuffs that have probably been on it since rocks were soft. She’s wearing faded jeans that line up with grunge fashion circa twenty-oh-two, except I know they’re just old and worn in, and she has a thick flannel button-up over a solid-color red sweater to keep out the chill of the Canterlot evening.

I bite my lip and focus, putting on the professional facade of ‘Scarlet Dream’ as I stand, pick up the requisite forms, and walk over to Applejack. Time to find out how well my disguise holds up under scrutiny.

It’s been better than two years since we’ve seen each other, and memories are shaky things. Hopefully, that's enough, and if it’s not I can always put her to sleep and make a few… adjustments.

I’d rather not, though.

“Fill these out before we begin,” I say without inflection as I pass her the clipboard. “If you have any questions I’m happy to explain.”

“Thanks, I—”

The words choke into silence and the clipboard drops from her fingers to clatter onto the floor as she stares up at me in blank horror for a moment.

‘Steady, Sunset… steady…’ I don’t bolt, I just stand there and give her a confused look, as if I’m not sure what she thinks she’s seeing.

“Miss Apple?” I say softly, forcing concern into my tone.

Applejack clenches her eyes shut and takes a long, shuddering breath, then turns away from me and leans on her knees, burying her face in her hands in a full body expression of bone-deep weariness.

“Dagnabbit, Ah’m awful sorry ‘bout that, Doc,” Applejack says through her fingers before pulling her hands away from her face and reaching down to pick up the clipboard.

Her cheeks are wet.

“Y’all just…” Applejack starts only to clam up and shake her head. “Sorry, Doc, weren’t nothin’ you did.”

She pulls the pen from the board’s clasp and starts filling out the form.

Her handwriting hasn’t gotten much better. It’s still the same chicken-scratch she wrote all of her essays in back when we shared English Lit class under Miss Harshwhinny. Something wells up in me as I watch her scrawl out her answers on the form. Pity, maybe, or maybe it’s just good old fashioned empathy.

“Are you alright?” I ask, careful to keep my voice modulated.

The pen scrapes to a halt for a moment before continuing on its meandering path across the page, and Applejack lets out a bitter little chuckle that turns into a sigh.

“Ah’m fine,” she replies. “Couple years back a friend’a mine… she uh… she took’er own life, and for a second there Ah thought Ah was starin’ at’er ghost.”

Applejack sits up straighter and hands me the completed form with the pen pinned between her thumb and the clipboard, and I take it from her. I give it a perfunctory glance, making sure there’s at least an answer in every slot, before tucking it under my arm.

“Threw me for a loop,” Applejack continued. “But then Ah took a closer look’n felt like a damn fool… ya look a little like’er is all, and Ah ain’t gonna lie, Ah’m awful tired, too.”

“Well, they say everyone has a doppelganger, right?” I reply with a forced laugh, and if anything Applejack’s answering laughter sounds even moreso.

“Y’all got no idea,” Applejack says finally as she stands up.

I bite back a chuckle at that as I turn to my desk and file away the paper before tapping through the system and bringing up her chart. I scan the notes, frowning as I do, then turn back to her.

“I understand you’re here for night terrors, then?” I say as I sift through the notes. “Doctor Wellborn wants to have some hard data for your charts… hmm…”

I look back up at Applejack who certainly looks bedraggled enough to be plagued with regular night terrors.

“You know,” I start. “From the look of things, I’d say you’re a farmer? Or something in the area, right?”

“Ayup,” Applejack replies.

“Maybe it’s just the stereotype but don’t farmers usually follow the whole ‘early to bed, early to rise’ rule?” I ask. “It’s ten at night, and generally patients show up an hour or two before they usually go to bed, meaning your usual bedtime is…”

“Uh, yeah, ‘round eleven or midnight, lately,” Applejack says. “Ah’m gonna be honest with ya Doc, Ah don’t get much sleep at the best’a times, and these nightmares’re takin’ what little Ah do get.”

I let out a small hum as I turn back to the charts and look over them.

She’s not wrong. If her self-report is right she gets maybe four hours of sleep a night at most, and that’s when she sleeps at all. She has a prescription for a pretty strong sleep aid, but I’d be willing to wager that she doesn’t take it very often if she's the still the same stubborn Applejack that I knew.

“You do have pajamas right?” I ask, suddenly realising she wasn’t carrying an overnight bag. “I can’t recommend sleeping in jeans, and I’m afraid we don’t allow sleeping in the nude.”

Applejack’s cheeks turn cherry red for a moment, then she laughs weakly.

“Uh, yeah, Ah got a uh… a friend bringin’em down,” Applejack replies. “She dropped me near the entrance before goin’ t’park her car is all, she should be here in no time.”

Oh good.

It's probably Pinkie or Rarity, which means my disguise will have to stand up to another round of scrutiny. If I’m lucky, maybe it will be Fluttershy. She's polite enough not to say anything even if she gets suspicious. Rarity is probably the worst-case scenario since she might recognise the dye job in my hair or the cosmetic lenses.

I'm not really sure what I'll do if it's Rainbow Dash.

Another knock sounds at the door, and I brace myself for what might be the start of a seriously bad night.

“Come in,” I say as we both turn to the door.

It creaks open and the young woman that steps through the door puts my heart into my throat. Her hair is a dark shade of sapphire shot through with strands of rosy pink and purple. She’s wearing a thick coat and unfashionable jeans, and her eyes are a little weary-looking, even familiar as they are.

Twilight Sparkle

I almost say her name on reflex, but I bite down on my tongue before the sound gets out as I school my face to a neutral expression of disinterest while I look her over.

This is not the Equestrian Princess I knew once upon a time, I’m absolutely certain of that after only a second.

She’s wearing thick glasses for one, and her hair is tied up in a messy bun that would’ve driven Princess Twilight insane. There’s something else, too, though. Maybe just something in the way she holds herself that’s comfortably human. On a guess, I'd say this is probably the human version of Twilight… the one who belongs here.

“Hey, Jackie.” Twilight pulls a small kitbag into the room and holds it out. “I had to park on the second basement level, I can’t believe how many people are here this late.”

“The hospital never sleeps,” I say wryly, and Twilight laughs. It’s a kind of squeaky laugh that ends in a snort which is annoyingly cute.

It’s hard to keep a smile off of my face at the sound, but the change in Applejack’s demeanor is like night and day. One moment she's practically dragging her feet, the next her whole face has lit up as Twilight drags the kitbag over to her and sets it down.

“Thanks, sugarcube,” Applejack says warmly as she stands and pulls Twilight into her arms, hugging her tight.

Twilight returns the hug before pulling back and smiling up at Applejack.

“I’ll be back tomorrow morning to pick you up, okay?” Twilight says softly. “Try and get some sleep.”

“Ah will,” Applejack promises.

“Good,” Twilight replies, then she reaches up and captures Applejack’s face in her hands and draws her down into a brief kiss.

My eyes widen at the sight. The kiss is short, sweet, and has all the casual softness of a familiar act. Applejack seems to breathe her in as their lips meet, and her hands go around the shorter woman’s hips with an intimate touch that tells me they’ve definitely been together for a while.

The way they act is quietly domestic, and it honestly makes me a little jealous. They didn’t have to worry about multi-dimensional murderers on pseudo-magical amphetamines. They're not afraid of slasher movie villains coming to life and butchering their way through half the city.

Insomnia and night terrors aside, they look… happy.

Twilight draws back for a moment before darting in and planting another kiss on Applejack’s cheek before stepping back.

“Love you,” Twilight chirps. “See you tomorrow.”

“Love ya too, Twi’,” Applejack says. “Don’t worry too much neither, Ah got Miss… uh…”

Applejack looks up at me sheepishly, and I realise that I never actually introduced myself.

“Scarlet Dream,” I say, tapping my ID badge. “My name is Scarlet Dream.”

“Miss Dream, here, lookin’ out for me.” Applejack finishes awkwardly.

Twilight crosses her arms and gives me a level look that goes up and down, then she purses her lips. “I don’t know how I feel about a pretty lady ogling you while you sleep, I’m pretty sure that’s my job.”

“Maybe so,” I reply casually. “But I have a degree and a certificate, which makes me a professional sleep ogler.”

There’s that laugh again. Squeaky and ending in a snort, and Applejack is smiling like a lovestruck dumbass. Honestly, though, I can see it. It’s a cute laugh, probably made all the more endearing because she’s in love with its owner. Hearing the person you love laugh should make you smile.

“Alright well, take care of her, okay?” Twilight says a little more seriously. “She really needs this, and it took months to convince her to see a doctor about it.”

That didn’t surprise me.

If Applejack is anything like I remember, then her stubborn streak is wider than Sweet Apple Acres itself.

“I’ll do my best,” I reply, “now, I’m afraid I am going to have to ask you to leave so Miss Apple can get ready and I can get the machines set up.”

“Alright,” Twilight turns and gives Applejack one last hug, they share another kiss, and then the woman who has the face of someone I once called a friend steps out of the room.

“Changing room is there,” I point to a nearby door. “Bathroom is the first on your left once you’re through the door.”

“Much obliged,” Applejack bobs her head. “An’ Ah’m sorry ‘bout Twi’ back there, she’s an awful bit’ve a worrywart when it comes t’me.”

“That’s not a bad thing,” I reply.

“Reckon it ain’t,” Applejack agrees. “Dunno what I’d be like if it weren’t fer her… she keeps me honest, and keeps mah head on straight.”

“I think everyone needs someone like that,” I say quietly.

“Reckon so.” Applejack smiles at me before turning and heading back into the changing room.

I curse at myself silently. This is a bad scenario. Not worst-case, maybe, but still bad. As far as Applejack and the others know, I am very, very dead. Or worse than dead, possibly, but that’s neither here nor there.

It’s hard enough keeping myself focused when I’m around people I like.

Keeping the murderous, psychopathic instincts that currently make up about half of my brain from going hog-fucking-wild around the girls whom I still blamed for abandoning me when I needed them most is not an experiment I’m too keen on trying.

Even if I wanted to reconnect with them, I can’t afford to. The world can’t afford for me to do that.

The Entity retooled my entire biology to be designed for one thing, and one thing only: killing. Out from under his control, I have my own mind back, but the instincts… they’re always there.

Adagio, Sonata, and I talk about them a lot, and it helps. We have a kind of an Ex-Murderers Anonymous, and I just got my one year chip, so I’m sort of sold on not falling off the wagon.

Especially since that would mean I murdered someone.

As my mind races, I go through the simple motions of prepping the room Applejack will be sleeping in. Tonight is not going to be fun, but at least it’s not Rainbow Dash in here. Applejack and I have always had a cool, sober relationship, and one that was based on a certain kind of mutual respect, even back when I was a rancid bitch. It won’t be too hard to keep my head on while she’s sleeping.

I hope.

A soft clearing of the throat draws my attention up as Applejack pokes her head in. She’s wearing simple, comfortable knit pants and a loose tee that strains against her broad shoulders and if she was anyone else I might find her attractive.

I can’t see it past the face of the girl who abandoned me, though.

“Ready for me?” Applejack asks.

“Mhm.” I nod and gesture at the bed. “Go ahead and lay down, I’m sure Doctor Wellborn went over what we’ll be doing, but I’ll go over it again just in case.”

Applejack nods and walks over to the bed, then lays down.

“I’m going to attach some sensors to you that will monitor your REM and NREM sleep patterns, they’re attached to this,” I gesture to the EEG next to the bed. “I’ll also attach a sensor that keeps track of blood pressure and oxygen levels, sometimes poor sleep can be the result of not getting enough oxygen during the night, which is usually—”

“Apnea, yeah,” Applejack nods. “Mah Uncle got that, he uses one’a those breathing machines when he sleeps.”

“CPAP machines, mhm,” I say. “I doubt that’s the case though, it’s usually the result of obesity, but there’s an outside chance it’s related to your heart. But once again, I doubt it.”

“Gotta say, Doc, I ain’t sure how Ah’m gonna get ta sleep wearin’ all those doodads,” Applejack says with a nervous hitch to her voice as she stares at the little white sensors.

I chuckle at that. “An actual full night of sleep isn’t the point, the information we gather is, but I guarantee you, you’ll fall asleep. Everyone does.”

At least, they do when I’m the one on shift.

Wellborn always comments on how I must have a particularly peaceful and inspiring presence, since everyone I watch over manages to actually sleep during the studies I’m involved in. The information I give him is always the purest, cleanest, and most accurate data of any we gather, to the point that he’s told me I’m his favorite sleep tech and if he could schedule me every single night, he would.

I wonder if he still would if he knew why they sleep.

I finish affixing the sensors to Applejack, and give a few more instructions in case she has to get up to use the bathroom or for some other reason, so as to disrupt the study as little as possible. She follows along, as dutiful and polite as ever, then thanks me and lays down.

“Hey, Doc?” Applejack calls out as I make to leave the room, and I sigh.

“Scarlet,” I say as I turn back to her, and she raises an eyebrow. “I’m not a doctor, I’m a polysomnographic technologist, but that’s a really long word and it doesn’t truncate well, so just… just call me Scarlet, or Scar, it’s what everyone else calls me.”

“Uh, S-Scar, then,” Applejack says with a weak laugh. “Sure thing, Ah just… Ah wanted t’thank ya.”

“Why?” I ask. “I’m just doing my job. I do this every night.”

“Yeah, but that don’t mean I ain’t supposed t’thank ya for tryin’ t’help me,” Applejack counters. “So thanks, Scar.”

I sigh quietly, and force myself to keep the grimace off of my face, schooling my expression to one of patient understanding.

“You’re welcome, Miss Apple.”

“Jackie,” Applejack replies, and I have to bite my lip to keep from groaning. “Fairs fair, if I’m callin’ ya Scar, then you can call me Jackie.”

“Jackie.” The name tastes familiar, like sour apples in a fall orchard. It’s nostalgic in a bad way, and it’s all I can do to keep the hurt in my chest from reaching my face. “Try and get some rest Miss—… Jackie.”

She smiles at me, and I mirror the expression before leaving to go to the observation room.

I have to remind myself that I can’t afford to be her friend again. Even if I was willing to, which I’m not, it’s not something I’m capable of.

There’s too much risk, and in more ways than one.

Instead, I sit down and wait a sixty count as I watch Applejack get settled, shift around, settle again. Just as she begins to relax I raise my hand, curl my fingers, and reach out for her tired mind, pressing into sleep as reflexive euphoria sends dark laughter bubbling past my lips.

Author's Note

I remember the days when the sun shone...

Part of my Marathon Fundraiser to help with my move! If you can support it please visit my Patreon!

1.3

My power has evolved since I left the Entity’s realm. The Old Stain designed me with the ability to reach into the minds of my prey and pull them into a delirium of half-slumber, but after my escape, I started to experiment.

I learned to passively draw people into the dream in a large area. It’s slow but relatively easy. It's how I knocked out half the Canterlot PD at the crime scene earlier this evening.

There was a small cost to that little modification, though.

Now I can only force people into the Dream quickly in two ways, the first is if I’m touching them.

The second is if they’re already exhausted.

Applejack’s psyche is a slurry. I have no idea how she was even upright and cogent during our conversation with how tired she is. Even with how little I like her, I can’t help but cringe at the mess her mind is.

She wants to sleep. I can feel that much. Unfortunately, there’s a mental wall between her and real rest. It’s hard and ugly, and as I run my metaphorical fingers across it I wince at the sharp barbs of trauma and guilt that are woven through it.

Stress, pain, self-hatred, and all manner of other negative emotions are gnawing at her. She’s scared and depressed, and I can feel the phantom aches and pains that have settled into her joints from her lack of sleep.

She’s destroying herself. Slowly but surely, she’s coming apart. Her gut is aching with acid reflux, and I can feel the telltale remains of alcohol in her system. It’s not recent, but I’d be willing to bet she nips from a bottle while Twilight isn’t looking.

“Damn it, Jackie.” I settle my will against the wall of stress in her mind.

Trauma or no, nothing mortal can resist a Killer’s power. My power is born of a biomystical Demon-God and it's designed to prey on mortals. With a surge of effort the wall cracks, then falls, and Applejack goes slack as I plunge her into an exhausted sleep.

“Alright, let’s see what we’re working with.”

I lace my fingers, crack my knuckles, and set the computer to record the incoming data before leaning back in my chair, closing my eyes and steadying my breathing.

It takes effort to control my powers outside of my dreaming state where I can wander the Dreamtime of Canterlot in my real skin.

‘real’

This is something I would never admit to Sour Sweet or Aria or Starlight, and certainly not to Tempest, as much as I care about her. I haven’t even admitted how I feel about it to Adagio and Sonata, but the truth is that, when I’m not dreaming, I feel… wrong.

My skin itches, as if it isn’t quite the right texture, and I’m always too cold. My fingers are constantly twitching unless I’m actively trying to stay still, and I have to quell a minor freakout every time I run my tongue over my teeth because for a moment I’m absolutely convinced they’re the wrong shape.

I want to hear the rasp of metal-on-metal when I twitch my fingers. I miss being fever-hot all the time, and the way my sharp, angular teeth fit together when I close my mouth. I hate how pale and soft my skin is, when it ought to be dark red and rubbery, like hide, but I can’t say any of that to anyone.

Tempest would never forgive me, while Star and Sour probably wouldn’t even be able to look at me. All three of them still have nightmares about dying over and over and over again on the Entity’s hooks, and the unspeakable feeling of being pulled apart and then put back together whenever we were drawn into the darkness.

“Enough, Shimmer, focus.” I grimace as I try to rally and reign in my intrusive thoughts. It does not do to dwell.

I focus on Applejack.

Her mind is near and even worn out it’s still strong. I can feel her exhausted psyche sinking quickly into a deep, restful state, though. She should hit REM in about half an hour, but I can still do a few preliminary checks on her before that.

With a silent effort of will, I start to count. I count out the enumeration of dusk, an old Imperial dreamers' trick. It brings my mind closer and closer to a state of lucid dreaming.

For most, all that means is that they can control their dream. Those people aren't dream demons.

If anyone in the area had the ability to peer into the spaces between the Wall of Sleep where I spend most of my free time, they would have seen a horrifying sight as I reached the final enumeration twenty minutes later.

They would have seen my body split open bloodlessly, my ribcage peeling apart and my organs shifting, as a pair of hands with fingers like silver blades emerged, followed by black jacket-clad arms, then my head of lank, red-gold hair, and then finally the rest of me as I tear free of my false body.

My disguise.

I shed the bloody shell of Sunset Shimmer, and am once more who I’m supposed to be.

The Nightmare.

My fingers twitch, and a rush of relief spreads through me as the long blades of my fingers rasp and click against one another. For a moment I’m overwhelmed by euphoria as I take a deep breath and my lungs fill with the scent of fresh meat.

Fresh hope.

It takes a monumental act of will to tamp that down.

“You’re better than this, Shimmer,” I mutter.

I glance back at my slumbering form, the rent in my body already having closed and left behind no sign that it was ever there. That body is the mask I wear for the world in more ways than one.

In a way, I’m grateful to the Old Stain for changing me the way he did. Whether or not he realises it, he’s the one who gave me the power to fight back, to take back my life from the people who had stolen it.

I stare down at my bladed hands, indulging myself for a moment as I admire the sharp edges and the rasp-and-click as I twitch my fingers. What can I say? Killers are like murderous cats, we like shiny sharp things, and I have the Entity to thank for it.

The Entity is the only reason I’m even alive. He saved me, forged me, destroyed me, then remade me into something stronger.

Something better.

Even if he had to break me to do it, the Entity is the one who taught me to harness my power. To harness my rage. The Entity taught me to see a new world, and then showed me how to reach it.

If Celestia was the closest thing to a mother that Little Orphan Sunset ever had then, in a twisted way, the Entity is the only father I've ever known.

I feel a little guilty that I turned out to be such a treacherous daughter.

None of that means I want to come back into the fold. I’m grateful, not stupid. I don’t want to be a mindless, slavering Killer hunting numpty nobodies through a Fog-ridden wasteland for the rest of eternity like Trapper. I mean, sure, it’s fulfilling work, has decent hours with plenty of off-time. You get to see new places, kill new people, and it’s got great job security, but I’d rather keep my sapience intact, thank-you-very-much.

But I can still send whoever stole his power screaming into his maw.

That solves my problem and, at least in my eyes, makes the Entity and me square, which kills two birds with one bloody carving knife.

Of course, that all assumes we even find the Thief, and until then I’ve got a job to do here, even if I don’t necessarily think one of my former friends deserves the special treatment.

I phase through the observation wall and into the room where Applejack is sleeping. Her brow is already furrowed with strain, and I frown at that. She shouldn’t even be dreaming yet, much less be in the throes of a nightmare.

Sure enough though, the EEG and other sensors are reading a high spike in stress levels. If this is the quality of sleep she’s been getting lately then it’s no wonder she looks like hot garbage.

“Fine,” I say curtly.

I extend a single, bladed finger over Applejack’s head, set the tip right between her eyes, and plunge my blade into her skull. My mind descends along my blade into Applejack’s dreaming psyche with a vertiginous drop. It’s a familiar sensation, one that goes deeper than a simple scan of surface memories. I’m falling all the way into the deepest parts of her subconscious where her brightest dreams and darkest nightmares dwell, although I’m guessing I’ll be finding more of the latter than the former once I get there.

The moment my boots hit the ground, I know I’m right.

“Really?” I raise an eyebrow and sigh. I could have lived the whole rest of my life not coming back to this shit hole.

Canterlot High.

The school looms tall in the darkness. It’s night, or something like it. It’s kind of hard to tell in nightmares because the light level is low either way. The school looks pretty bad, too. The windows are all shattered or boarded up, the front door is hanging off of its hinges, and even the masonry is starting to come apart.

And sitting at the fronts steps of the school is my one-time friend, Applejack, looking younger but still just as worn, cradling my dead body in her arms.

“Oh…” the word leaves my lips, and I’m genuinely wrong-footed for a moment. “This is what’s been keeping you awake at night?”

Guilt is a powerful thing. I know that better than most.

I approach slowly, walking down the cobbled path towards the stone steps of the school’s entrance where Applejack is rocking back and forth, curled protectively around my body as she sobs softly.

Even knowing she can’t see me or perceive me in any meaningful way, I still try and keep my footsteps quiet as I reach her side.

My body is a mess. All broken and bloody from the four-story fall. Applejack has my head pressed her chest, and all she’s doing is muttering apologies over and over. She’s begging for my forgiveness, even knowing I’m long gone and can never give it.

“It didn’t have to end like that, Jackie,” I say quietly. “All I wanted was for someone… anyone… to take my side. Or not even take my side, but to at least give me a fair shake.” I crouch down and reach out, brushing a few locks of drab blond strands from her face as Applejack weeps over dream-me’s corpse. “I was homeless, destitute, and totally alone, Jackie… this was always where I was going to end up.”

“Ah’m s-sorry,” Applejack sobs as she hugs my body. “Ah didn’t know… ah never meant’ta… Ah’m just so damn sorry, Sunset.”

“Yeah,” I say, even though she’s deaf to me. “Me too.”

The moment is shattered by the deafening report of a gunshot, and my jaw drops as Applejack is sent sprawling back towards the broken doors of the school with a bloody hole in her shoulder and leaving my dream-corpse to drop bonelessly to the concrete.

I whip around with blades splayed and fury filling my gut as the sound of a bolt-action rifle chambering another round rends through the air like thunder.

For a moment I think it must be one of the Entity’s Killers, one of my erstwhile siblings come to reave a broken soul of their hope, but that’s impossible. It’s just a dream… a very bad dream.

The woman approaching the school entrance looks awfully familiar. She’s wearing a red and white checkered button-down, jeans not unlike Applejack’s that are belted with a sturdy leather strap, and her hair is a barely-tamed mess of orange curls kept in check by a simple hair-tie.

Her eyes are what really do it, though.

They’re brilliant stars of turquoise and they’re absolutely filled with contempt.

“Jacqueline Apple,” the woman’s voice is a viperous hiss. “How dare you…”

“Ah’m sorry!” Applejack sobs as she kicks and crawls away on her back, trying to put distance between herself and the woman.

“How dare you call yourself an Apple!” The woman takes aim again and pulls the trigger with merciless accuracy as Applejack tries to rise.

The shot takes Applejack in the gut, dropping her to the ground curled around her perforated stomach as she shakes and cries piteously. My stomach twists at the sight… who the hell is this woman? What kind of person could possibly reduce Applejack, one of the strongest young women I’ve ever met, to a gibbering ball of tears?

“How dare,” the woman continues, “you call yourself mah daughter!”

Oh.

Now I remember where I’ve seen her face. I didn’t recognise it because, in the lone picture I’ve seen of her, she was smiling, and I thought at the time that it was a face that wasn’t really made for anger. Seeing the face of Pear Butter, Applejack’s dead mother, twisted in rage and fury, is almost obscene.

“Please, momma, please!” Applejack sobs and shakes as she stares up at the woman I know for a fact that she idolizes. “Ah didn’t mean to! Ah swear it, momma!”

The shade of Pear Butter ratchets the bolt back and chambers another round as she moves closer to her daughter, stepping over my body to do so, and settles her aim down the sights of the rifle right between Applejack’s eyes at point-blank range.

“Don’t you call me that,” Pear Butter hisses. “You’re no daughter’a mine.”

“And that’s enough of that,” I say.

I sink my blades into the fabric of Applejack’s dreamscape, tighten my grip on the dream, wave my hand, and tear the nightmare to threads, dissolving it like Fog.

Pear Butter ripples and fades away, and Applejack stares dumbfounded for a few seconds before she jerks back and starts patting herself down.

Her hands go quickly over her stomach and shoulder, but the wounds have vanished along with the nightmare versions of me and her mother.

I sigh and turn my back on her, content that I had bought her at least one night of decent slee—

“S-Sunset?”

I freeze.

She shouldn’t be able to see me. Nothing about her mind should be capable of perceiving me. I’m masked by my own Fogborn powers. Her mind is basically my bitch if I want it to be.

“Sunset? Is… Is that you?” Her voice is tremulous and strained, but I hear her rise nonetheless. “P-Please… will ya… will ya just turn around?”

Part of me knows I shouldn’t. I should just wipe her mind of this and walk out of her dream, but the rest of me refuses.

Slowly, I turn to face her, and what little color is left in her face vanishes as she takes in my features.

I know what she’s seeing. She’s seeing a demon that looks like the girl she helped kill. She's seeing red skin shot through with veins of icy blue. Long, lank, red and gold locks that are stained and matted with sweat and blood hanging over eyes like shards of icy hate, and a mouthful of fangs.

What I see is maybe more surprising. There’s Applejack, yes, but there’s something between us and not in the metaphorical sense. A frayed, barely-there strand of topaz light. Given that Applejack isn’t looking at, or questioning, it, I assume she can’t see it… but I can wager a guess as to its nature.

Harmony.

The last ragged strands of our old bond, and the magic that used to flow between us. I suppose that’s how Applejack is able to see me. Cute, but in the end it’s nothing more than an odd little trick of fate due to some magical leftovers.

Ignoring the strand, I adjust my long, ragged black jacket as I face her down. My fingers are twitching spasmodically, filling the air between us with raspy clicks.

“Are… are ya real?” Applejack asked weakly.

It takes a lot of effort to keep my expression neutral. To keep all of the vitriol and anger from just spilling out over her like vomit. There’s no point, though… she’s already torturing herself every night, and honestly it's exhausting to even think about.

“I’m just a nightmare, Jackie,” I say. “I’m whatever was left over after you five were done with me… that’s all.”

A stricken look crosses her face, one that’s just pain. There’s no fear, no sorrow or grief. Just pain.

“Ah’m sorry, Sunset,” Applejack sobs. “Please, just… I just want’ta take it all back, and if Ah could Ah would, I’d give anythin’ to take it all back.”

I close the distance between us slowly, and to Applejack’s credit she doesn’t pull away. Despite my looking like something that crawled out of Hell, which is a more accurate summation that most would guess, Applejack stands her ground until I’m less than an arms-length away.

“I’m dead, Applejack,” I say finally, and her face falls. “You can apologise to a gravestone all you want, but it can’t forgive you.”

“But… but you’re here!” Applejack steps forward and reaches out to grab me, but I let her hands pass through me. She staggers, staring at her empty hands for a long moment before looking back at me. “You’re… you’re right here.”

I shake my head. “I told you, Jackie… I’m just a nightmare, and that’s all that will ever be left of me.”

Her arms fall back to her sides, and the silence of the dark dreamscape fills in the space around us like a thick sheet of cotton. It’s covering our mouths and eyes and ears, choking us both with the grudge that lay between us.

“Do ya hate me?” Applejack asks in a small voice.

My fingers twitch and rasp against each other at her words. Do I hate her? Do I hate her for abandoning me when I needed her most, like the other girls who were supposed to be my friends? Do I hate her for looking the other way while the rest of the school abused and beat me over and over again?

Do I hate her?

“Yes,” I say finally, and her face pales while her pupils shrink to pinpricks at my words. “But it doesn’t matter… I’m a nightmare, Jackie, you won’t remember any of this come morning.”

That’s right.

Nightmares can’t exist in the light. Come morning, this will be gone. Just another patch of Fog chased away by the relentless advance of the day.

Applejack looks like she’s about to say something, but before another word can leave her mouth I stab a single finger right through the middle of her dream-self’s forehead, and she freezes. I make a few adjustments, wiping away the image of me, the conversation we had, and everything to do with my Killer shape.

She resists. It’s harder than it should be. Harder than any mortal mind should be for me to adjust. Maybe it’s because she used to wield magic. Hell, maybe she’s just that stubborn, but in the end I wipe it all away. She’ll remember fragments, maybe, but nothing defined.

Dreams are like that, you know.

And then she’ll sleep, dreamless and deep.

“I’m just a nightmare, Jackie,” I whisper, even knowing she can’t hear me anymore. “You have to let me go… I’m dead, and I’ll always be dead, and you’ll always be one of the people who helped kill me, make peace with that.”

With an effort of will, I pull my blade from her and Applejack’s form dissolves as her dreamscape collapses around me, and I rise from the depths of her subconscious to return to the world of light where I no longer belong.

Author's Note

Failure tests the mettle of heart, brain, and body.

Part of my Marathon Fundraiser to help with my move! If you can support it please visit my Patreon!

1.4

I open my waking body’s eyes slowly to a relentless, tinny chiming coming from somewhere nearby. It takes me a few moments to recognise it as the ‘call’ function on my intercom, and I shake the cobwebs from my head as I reach into my breast pocket and pull out the little black cylinder that looks a bit like an old-timey journalist’s recorder, but half the size.

Clicking the ‘Receive’ button, I raise it to my lips.

“Scarlet Dream here,” I say groggily.

//Hey Red, did I catch you napping again?// Aria’s voice came out distorted by static but audible enough that her wry tones were crystal clear.

“Yeah, I’ve got an… an old friend down here,” I respond as I stand up and stretch, trying to get some blood flowing back to my brain and extremities.

In the observation room, Applejack is sleeping peacefully. The lines of strain on her face are finally gone, replaced with the slackness of real sleep. She’ll probably be out long past the normal wake-up time but to be honest she could probably use it. Her head is still a rat’s nest, though. No amount of dream sorcery can fix that.

//Ouch, who is it?// Aria asks.

“Applejack.” I sit back down as I reply, fiddling with the computer and checking over the real-time recording to make sure there aren’t any skips or discrepancies. “She came in for exhaustion from night terrors, but honestly there’s no medication in the world that can fix what’s wrong with her. I’m gonna leave a note in her file to recommend fifty CC’s of therapy and maybe a vacation somewhere other than Canterlot with her girlfriend.”

//Ooh, Hayseed’s got a lady?// Aria jeered.

“Don’t you have gunshot victims to look after, Doctor Blaze?” I ask testily.

There’s no reply for a while, but I can practically hear Aria laughing at me from her office in the Emergency Department.

“Seriously, though,” I continue, “you’re not gonna believe it, but Applejack’s with Twilight Sparkle now.”

//Wait what?! You mean…?// She trails off, but I know what she’s thinking.

“No, not that one, you know the portal is shut for good,” I say quietly. “It's the one from, y’know, here. Which isn't that surprising, really, since Twi’ is a Canterlot native.”

//I guess so,// Aria replies, her former good humor vanishing. //Weird coincidence though.//

“No more so than all five of those girls meeting up and being friends in both dimensions,” I point out. “Honestly, Twi’ meeting Applejack, along with the rest of them, was probably more inevitable than it was a coincidence.”

//Yeah, fair enough, I guess,// Aria says. //Anyway, you got a minute? Me and ‘Hearts got some actual results back for once.//

My heart leaps at her words.

“Hell yes,” I hiss, “I can’t leave but—”

//No problem, we can, it’s dead up here for once,// Aria says. //If they need us they can call us. Sleep clinic is like, down the hall.//

“I’ll be here,” I say.

Where else would I be? Still, the possibility of real results after almost eight months of bupkis is a high point to my night that I really needed after having to deal with Applejack.

It takes Aria less than ten minutes before her familiar knock is sounding at my door, followed by the woman herself. On her heels is the Director of the Canterlot General ED, Redheart, a former nurse practitioner that got her M.D. out of spite, and it showed.

She was the one who had been on hand when I’d been brought in a year ago, and she’d seen things that night that Aria had been forced to explain in order to get me treated. By the time I started my recovery her memories were too ingrained for me to futz with, so instead, I’d just told her that she was better off just ignoring what happened and passing it off as a weird occurrence, but that wasn’t enough for the woman.

I warned her that this business was potentially lethal. I warned her that just being in our general proximity and associating herself with us could lead to a literal fate worse than death,

None of that had fazed the thirty-nine-year-old doctor. Despite her soft exterior, pale complexion, and powder-pink hair, she had real steel in her spine.

“A’right, Red,” Aria says around a dum-dum she had in her mouth. She always seems to be eating something for some reason. “You ready for this?”

“I died ready, Ari’,” I reply with a cocked grin.

“First off,” Redheart starts grimly, “none of this data is necessarily reliable, we have no means of comparison, and what we’re dealing with isn’t strictly physi—”

“Yeah, yeah, hold this for me, Doc.” In one smooth movement, Aria takes out her lollipop and pops it into Redheart’s mouth before plucking the clipboard from her shocked fingers.

“Smooth,” I say as I stand to get a better look at the results.

“Unsanitary,” Redheart grumbles around the lollipop.

She doesn’t take it out though.

Aria has this weird ability to get away with anything, but that’s doubly true with Redheart. Aria can ask her for something completely unreasonable like, say, permission to run secret and undocumented medical tests using hospital equipment, bat her eyelashes, and the Director immediately folds.

It’s also the worst kept secret in the ED that Redheart is sleeping with her best doctor, but the hospital administration turns a blind eye to that for good reasons.

Mainly their extreme competence.

Redheart is the best Director they’ve ever had, and she’s held the position for longer than anyone expected. The position comes with a lot of burnout from what I hear, and the last Director only managed it for a couple of years before requesting a transfer.

Due to its unpopularity, whoever is willing to hold the position is given a lot of leeway. Administration makes certain allowances for a Director who’s willing to stay in a job that literally no one else wants but that they desperately need to keep filled.

Aria is in the same boat. Despite only being with Canterlot General for a year and a half-ish, she’s racked up more ED hours than half the Doctors in the hospital put together. She’s single-handedly letting Doctors who would never set foot in the ED stay in their cushy little offices, and they are more than happy to keep it that way.

Hell, she’s the only one who’s ever requested a permanent station there, and nobody gives a damn why. They're just happy someone is willing to take the job.

“Okay…” Aria mumbles as she flips through the papers, “here we go, so we’ve got real results for those of us who are still definitely mortal.”

“What about the three of us who...” I grimace and trail off.

“Yeah, those results are still basically garbage,” Aria replies, and I curse. “But—!” She flails the clipboard at me “—we have learned some pretty weird stuff!”

Redheart pulls the lollipop from her mouth and sticks it back between Aria’s lips as she reclaims her clipboard.

“The blood samples from the non-converted subjects are fascinating.”

Non-converted is Redheart’s term for those who were taken but not turned into a Killer. Her theory is that the Killer state is one of total biological conversion, while the Survivor is sort of a half-way point between human and whatever kind of species you'd call a Killer.

“The simplest conclusion is that technically speaking I was right, none of you are fully human anymore,” Redheart says briskly.

My eyebrows rise up to my hairline.

I mean, I knew that had to be the case for Sonata, Adagio, and myself, but all of us?

“How do you mean?”

Aria exchanges the lollipop’s place again, much to Redheart’s annoyance.

“It's the Fog,” Aria says. “The Fog is inside of us. Me, Sour, Star, probably Tempest too. It’s in you and my sisters obviously, but in, like, catastrophically higher quantities.”

“I wish Tempest would let us run the tests on her,” Redheart grumbles around the lollipop. “I’d like a full dataset.”

“It was purely voluntary, Hearts,” Aria reminds her. “If Tempest doesn’t want to be your lab rat, that’s her call, honestly I'm surprised Star was willing to after her experiences with The Doctor.”

Redheart continues grumbling but doesn’t argue. She tried it months ago when she started putting the project together, and Tempest refused flat out to be ‘treated like a test tube’ as she put it, punctuating her point with a series of colorful Marexican curses.

“Okay, so… what is it doing to you?” I ask, feeling a little lightheaded at the idea that we’d all brought something of the Trials out with us. “To all of you?”

“Near as we can tell?” Aria says, glancing at Redheart who just shrugs. “It’s improving us.”

I stare at Aria for a long moment before shaking my head and laughing.

“Uhm… what?” I could not have heard that right. “Improving?”

“Yes,” Redheart replies around the dum-dum. “Cardiovascular systems, immune systems, nervous systems… everything shows biological improvement.

“The non-converted have a rate of vascular recovery after exertion comparable to an Olympic athlete. Their blood clots almost forty per cent faster than average, their reaction time is on par with certain forms of neural savantism, and they’re almost totally immune to disease and infection.”

Redheart is breathing hard by the end of her rant, and she looks almost feverish, with wide eyes and flushed cheeks.

“God you’re hot when you get that crazy look in your eyes,” Aria says, earning a glower from Redheart.

“Anyway, the Entity did something to us, Red,” Aria continues as she turns back to me. “And by that I mean, the moment it took us, it changed us.”

“How?” I tried to recall what it felt like to be taken. It was a long time ago, but it was also… hazy. “I don’t even remember it, really.”

“Yeah.” Aria’s face falls as she crosses her arms over herself. “Kinda like how none of us really remembers what happens after we’re sacrificed?”

A sluice of ice water goes down my spine at her words. She isn’t wrong though. Everyone has vague and horrifying conceptions of what happened, but nothing definite.

For me, it had been the feeling of being taken apart piece by piece and then put back together just slightly wrong. Starlight had described feeling like she was being unraveled, like an old sweater, and Sour said it felt like being opened up, like an autopsy, and having everything taken out and being left empty.

Tempest still refuses to speak about what it felt like for her, and we all agree that no one has the right to ask someone to relive that.

I don’t like thinking about it either.

“Okay, so, you said the Fog is inside of us, right?” I ask. “What do you mean?”

Aria and Redheart share a look that’s just a little too long for me to be totally comfortable with.

“That’s… complicated,” Redheart says cautiously. “The short of it is that the Fog? It’s… it's been woven into your genetic code, it’s literally a part of you, a part of all of you.”

My stomach does an uncomfortable flip at the idea. The idea that Tempest and the rest of the girls were permanently altered by the Entity in a way they had no control over is not my favorite idea in the world. That it goes as deep as their DNA is troubling for a variety of reasons.

“How is that possible?” I ask, knowing that it couldn’t just end there. There had to be more to it than just that. “How could the Entity have changed us that much and we didn’t notice?”

“You know how we always thought our ability to heal and survive the wounds the Killers gave us was some magic of the Trials?” Aria says as she walks over to the couch and plops down on it before gesturing for me to join her.

I nod and follow, sitting beside her as she holds up the charts. Some of it I understand, some of it is just medical jargon that’s over my head.

“Well, it wasn’t,” Aria continues. “Or at least, it wasn’t just magic.”

“This is going to get technical but follow me, alright?” Redheart says as she pulls a chair close and sits down in front of us. “Aria’s DNA contains sets of markers that match nothing in the human genome, those same markers are present in the rest of the non-converted. My theory is that these interact with the Fog, catalysing with it during the Trials.”

“Think about how many lethal hits we took,” Aria says. “Think about how long it took one of us to bleed out on the ground despite having a goddamn hole in our guts!”

“I… I always thought it was just the Entity keeping us alive long enough to hook us,” I say uneasily.

“It was,” Aria replies. “It’s just that it did it biologically and magically. Magic doesn’t heal everything, Red… it has a lot of limitations when it comes to serious wounds. The Entity didn’t just take us, it respun our entire genetic code to make us better at not dying so it could torture us for longer.”

My stomach is doing flips again. I can’t even fathom that level of magical complexity. It would have had to have been magic that let it rewrite us like that, but the amount of power and control that suggested… the Entity really is a God on par with, or above, the legendary Spirit of Disharmony.

“On the other hand, did think of something else to test,” Aria says in a slightly more chipper voice.

“Cool, I could use something that isn’t existentially harrowing,” I reply.

“Mm, can’t promise that,” Redheart says blithely.

Aria pulls out an empty glass test tube from her pocket, along with the plastic cap, and passes it over to me with a wide grin. “Here, breathe into that and then cap it.”

I raise an eyebrow at her, then shrug and blow a breath into the tube, cap it, and pass it back to her. Redheart immediately gets up and scoots in beside Aria as the former Siren gives the tube a few good shakes before rummaging around in her pocket again and drawing out a small flashlight.

“Alright, ‘Hearts, time to test your theory,” Aria says quietly.

Then she raises the flashlight, presses it against the side of the tube, and turns it on.

“Yahtzee,” Redheart breathes.

“Shit.” Aria apparently has a different feeling on the matter.

“What?” I stand up and move over to them, crouching down so I can look at the vial. “What’s wrong with my—”

What I’m saying dies in my throat as I see what’s inside the vial.

It’s faint… so faint that it’s almost imperceptible, but it’s definitely there. It might be in only the barest trace amounts, but the fact that the contents of that test tube came out of me is enough to make me want to claw my own chest open.

Fog.

There’s the barest hint of Fog in the tube.

I literally breathed out Fog.

“I thought so,” Redheart sits up and shakes her head. “Your powers aren’t just magic, they’re fueled by the Fog, so that meant that either you would lose your powers outside of the Trials, which obviously you haven’t…”

“Or I’m self-sustaining,” I say hollowly as I stand up and stagger back to my seat so I can slump down in it. “I’m a living Fog machine.”

“Essentially, yes,” Redheart agrees. “Given the drastic changes that have occurred in the non-converted, I honestly can’t even imagine what it must have done to you.”

“Thanks for the pep talk, ‘Hearts, that was really encouraging,” Aria says testily before looking back at me. “Look, Red, it’s messed up, but it doesn’t really change anything for you, y’know? Same with ‘Dagi and ‘Nata… they’re still themselves.”

I’m not so certain that’s true, but I don’t say it. Every time I change, I have to fight back the ingrained instincts of my nature as a Killer. I used to think it was just some kind of preprogrammed biological imperative, but now I have to wonder if that’s not the case. I wonder if, maybe, the Entity is still in my head somewhere… whispering… driving me to do it’s bidding and send more people into the Fog.

Adagio says she has the same impulses, but she fights them back for our sake and for Timber’s sake. Sonata doesn’t shift into her Killer state at all because she’s afraid she won’t have the strength to come back from it, so we’re not sure about her.

“I do have one other theory,” Redheart begins with a touch of unease, and I raise an eyebrow at that.

Aria sighs and glares at Redheart for a moment. “C’mon, ‘Hearts… is this really the time?”

“It’s not as if she’s going to get any less ‘foggy’,” Redheart replies with a terse gesture at me. “Sorry, Sunset, but this theory… it could be a weapon against whatever stole the Entity’s powers, and it may save Aria’s life one day, so you’ll forgive me if I’m biased.”

Well, that got my attention. “A weapon?”

I stand up, pushing back my revulsion at the idea of the Fog just sitting inside of me and fixing Redheart with a hard look.

“Sort of,” Redheart says. “The Fog catalyses with non-converted bodies, making them faster, stronger, more agile, and giving them a greater healing factor.”

“Yeah, I got that part—” I wave my hand for her to continue— “what’s the idea?”

“She wants to harvest Fog from you, ‘Dagi, and ‘Nata,” Aria says, and there’s an undercurrent of anger in her tone.

That earns a grimace.

“Don’t say it like that, Ari’!” Redheart swats Aria on the back of the head lightly with the clipboard before turning back to me. “I just want to collect it using a breathing apparatus! The short of it is this: The Fog can make the non-converted stronger and more durable, I can make an inhalant system that can deliver doses of the Fog in short bursts.”

That… didn’t actually sound so bad.

The Fog isn’t toxic, at least not to us, obviously. We were surrounded by the stuff back in the Trials. If that was the reason we were all so durable, then it would make sense to make use of it now. The more I think about it, the more it feels like the right course of action.

“Are we sure we won’t trigger conversion?” I ask. I have to ask it, even though I'm certain I know the answer.

“Obviously we can’t know the answer for sure,” Redheart says. “But considering the quantities of Fog you all were exposed to near-constantly during your imprisonment, I doubt the comparatively minor amounts delivered through an inhaler would even register in that regard.”

I nod at that. I’m fairly certain the creation of a Killer requires a lot more than just Fog, too. I’m not sure it’s exactly an automatic process either. Every Killer is substantially different, and each one seems to be heavily influenced by their own pasts. Adagio reverted to her violent Huntress aspect from hundreds of years ago after the murder of her family. Sonata channeled the spectral rage of her ghostly self from when she was tortured in the bowels of the Crotus Prenn Asylum.

And me?

I became a reflection of the living nightmare that was my life. A monster whose hands could only hurt other people, and whose power existed only to turn dreams into horrifying prisons of anguish.

There was more to the creation of a Killer than just Fog. There was purpose, intention, and… acceptance.

Will you-Won’t you?

The Old Stain didn’t force anything on me. He didn’t turn me into this against my will. No… he dragged me into the shadows, and then he asked.

Will you be mine?

And I said yes.

We all did.

“Alright, let’s set something up then,” I say. “We’ll figure out some time for us all to come in and you can collect as much Fog as possible. If we’re going up against new Killers, I want every advantage we can get our hands on.” I look over at Aria who's more grumpy than usual, and frown. “Only if everyone’s okay with it, though… same deal as the tests, so if Sonata or Adagio don’t want to do this, we won’t make them, but I’m in.”

I sit back down and bury my face in my hands for a few moments as I take several long breaths.

“You okay, Red?” Aria asks.

“Yeah.” I lean back in my chair and pull my hands away, and sigh as I stare up at the stucco ceiling. “I just hate playing catch-up… I don’t want to lose anyone, Ari’.”

“I hear you,” Aria replies quietly before turning to Redheart. “Alright, babe, let’s do this.”

Aria and Redheart make to leave, but not before Aria comes over and wraps her arms around me, pulling me into a tight hug. She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t need to. She’s my sister, maybe not by blood, but that doesn’t change anything.

I never would have imagined back during the Battle of the Bands that the women who would end up being my ride-or-die family would be the three Sirens I sang down on the stage at Canterlot High and not the six girls who had pulled me out of a crater months before.

Then again, they were the ones that put me there. Not that I didn’t deserve it, but the facts remain, our relationship was probably poisoned from the get-go.

Aria is the closest thing to a platonic soulmate I’ve ever had. She gets me in ways even Tempest doesn't, and I appreciate her more than I have words for. We don’t need words, though… not really. She and I get each other and that’s all we really need. In the end, I’d do absolutely anything for Aria Blaze, and I know she would do the same for me.

“Take care of yourself, Red,” Aria whispers as she pulls back. “Call me if you need me.”

“Same,” I say back, finally finding my smile.

Taking Redheart’s hand, Aria walks out of my little clinic to head back to their department, and I turn back to the slumbering form of my once-friend.

Applejack and the girls… they weren’t even my friends for terribly long, but the time we did have was something I cherished, specifically because I’d never had it before.

I had never had friends, never had anyone who wanted to be friends, and being with them had given me hope that things could get better which is why it was so devastating for me when I lost them… because in the end all it proved was that nothing ever would.

None of that matters now, though, so I settle back into my chair for another long, boring night, and try to ignore the fact of who it is I’m watching over.

I survived the long nightmare of the Trials. One night of doing my fucking job isn’t going to kill me.

Author's Note

A momentary abatement...

Part of my Marathon Fundraiser to help with my move! If you can support it please visit my Patreon!

1.5

By the time morning rolls around, I’m exhausted.

That’s a little odd for me but then again, I did just spend the entire night watching over Applejack of all people, so I guess I'm just a little more high-strung than usual.

Nothing interesting happened all night. She had a few more bouts of night terrors which gave us some good readings, enough for Doctor Wellborn to act on my suggestions. He trusts me more than most and if I say this person needs therapy as much or more than she needs pills, he’s usually pretty good about taking that into account.

Now, though, it’s near the end of my shift and Applejack still hasn’t woken up.

“Come on, Hayseed, I’m not staying here all day,” I grumble as I lean back in my chair and rub at my eyes.

It’s times like this I’m thankful that my office is underground. I don’t have to deal with the dawn or anything like that. I hate bright lights. I never used to have a problem with them, so a part of me can’t help but wonder if it’s a side-effect of my Killer biology. We’re beings of darkness and Fog. Getting a flashlight to the eyes is a painful experience for a normal person, but to a Killer it’s agonising. Our optics are coded for being able to pierce the thin light and thick Fog of the Trials, not to deal with clear skies and sunlight and all these quill-damned fluorescent lights.

“Come o~n,” I groan as I drop my head to my desk with a quiet thud. “I’d prefer not to wake you up myself,” I grumble into the desk, “but I’ll do it.”

A knock at the door interrupts my thought process and I sit up sharply before carding my fingers through my hair to make myself a little more presentable.

“Come in!” I call, leveling my voice out again to the recognisable alto of ‘Scarlet Dream’.

The door opens and a slightly care-worn Twilight Sparkle steps through. She’s wearing a thick sweater the same color as her hair, and a pair of thick grey pants to ward off the cold outside, and her glasses are still foggy from the temperature change.

As she brushes snow from her hair and wipes off her glasses, I take a closer look at her, and it only leaves me more certain that this Twilight Sparkle is definitely the human one.

For one, she’s awkward.

Not in the way that Princess Twilight was, where she wasn’t quite able to get the gist of walking on two legs for a good while. She's awkward in that, as she wipes off her glasses and takes a step into the sleep clinic, she catches her sleeve on the doorknob and nearly falls on her ass when the stray garment jerks her backward.

I have to hold back a laugh as she yelps and stumbles. I can see why Applejack finds her charming. She’s endearing in a goofy kind of way.

“Good morning, Miss Sparkle,” I say with more cheer than I’d been feeling a moment before. “Hope the morning commute treated you alright.”

“Oh, it was fine,” Twilight says, waving a hand dismissively. “I listen to audiobooks in traffic, I actually like getting caught in jams since I never have time to read anymore.”

“A funny way of viewing traffic jams, but I follow,” I say.

“Uhm, where’s Applejack?” Twilight glances around, mostly focusing on the back near the changing room, but I direct her attention back to the observation room with a chuckle and a pointed finger.

“Turns out she was a lot more tired than she thought,” I reply with a laugh. “Normally people are up and ready to go by about seven or so, but she’s still snoozing.”

“Oh!” Twilight looks pleasantly surprised. “Well, that’s good… she’s been having so much trouble sleeping lately that I was starting to get worried.”

I stand and crack my neck back and forth as I look over at Applejack and frown.

“I don’t know if this is cause not to worry, honestly,” I admit. “She’s clearly going through some rough stuff. My guess is some kind of past trauma surfacing through her dreams… it’s not that uncommon, honestly.”

Twilight frowns but she doesn’t refute me, instead she just looks pensive as she turns to stare over Applejack’s slumbering form with a kind of sorrowful expression.

“You don’t seem surprised,” I add, and Twilight nods.

“Her friend committed suicide two years ago,” Twilight says softly. “She never forgave herself for it… she blames herself, and it’s destroying her.”

I’d come to roughly the same conclusion. I won’t lie, a part of me had hoped the girls really had just fucking moved on.

“Can I ask you something?” I look over at Twilight who meets my eyes with a curious tilt to her head. “You two are together, I assume?”

She nods, then scowls. “Is that a problem?”

“If it was, then my powerlifter girlfriend and I would be having a really awkward conversation tonight,” I say with a laugh, and a look of relief passes over Twilight’s face. “No, I only ask because technically sharing medical details of any kind is a HIPAA violation, but—”

“I’m in her file as an emergency contact,” Twilight breaks in. “And I have a paper somewhere in there that says it’s okay to share the details with me, per her family and herself.”

I raise my eyebrows at that. I shouldn’t be surprised, though. The Twilight of this world is apparently just as fastidious and careful when it comes to properly filing paperwork as the one from my own dimension.

“Fair enough,” I allow. “I put a note in her file to refer her to a psychiatrist and a therapist, both. The former to assess her for antidepressants, and the latter to help talk her through her issues because one or the other probably won’t be enough.”

“Thank you, I was hoping for that, actually,” Twilight replies.

“Here’s the bump in the road, though,” I continue, drawing a look from Twilight. “You said you had a lot of trouble convincing her to just come in for this sleep study, right?”

She nods at that, then pauses, and sighs.

“I see where you’re going.” Twilight turns to look over Applejack and shakes her head. “You’re afraid she won’t take the meds or go to therapy.”

“We can recommend and refer until we’re blue in the face, but we can’t force her to go without committing her,” I say.

The Applejack I knew would probably have fought tooth and nail against going to any kind of therapy. Mental health isn’t exactly a comfortable topic when it comes to her family, and as far as I know, none of them have ever seen any kind of therapist despite having something of a history of family tragedy. I wager the odds of her actually going to therapy once it was set up as being less than thirty per cent.

“Is… is she in danger?” Twilight’s tone is fragile, and it’s not hard to see the strain on her face. “From… y-y’know.”

I shake my head. “I couldn’t say, I’m not her friend.”

A truer statement, there never was.

“I do suggest that, if possible, she get a good support group,” I say. “There’s plenty of grief counselors here at Canterlot General, and from what you say it sounds like she never processed any of her feelings.” I turn to Twilight as a thought occurs to me. “Does she have any friends she can talk to about this? A solid social structure can be a huge difference.”

To my absolute shock, Twilight shakes her head.

“No, not really,” Twilight says quietly. “She had some close friends once, but they’ve all drifted apart since she graduated and she doesn’t like talking about them.”

That caught me badly off guard.

‘Drifted apart’? They were supposed to be bound together by literal magic! How do you drift apart from that?

“What about family?”

Twilight sighs and shrugs. “That’s… kind of complicated.”

That’s not good. Applejack was all about her family back when I knew her. It was actually a little uncomfortable for me since I’d never had one of my own. Having her talking about her mass of cousins, aunts, and uncles, and all their reunions and parties always made me feel like shit, although I never said anything about it.

It always felt too petty to mention.

“Applejack and her brother run the farm, so she rarely leaves it,” Twilight continues. “Her grandmother passed early this year, and her sister?” Twilight grimaces sighs. “That’s… a completely different can of worms. They don't really get along.”

“I see,” I say quietly.

Granny Smith is dead? I mean, she was ancient, so I’m not too surprised, but that must have broken Applejack’s heart. Between that and whatever is going on with Apple Bloom, all was clearly not right in paradise.

I’m not going to lie. The notion that my death inflicted this kind of damage, or at least some of it, has me feeling… conflicted.

I hate them, I’m not sure I have anything left in me but hate for them. Not anger, not rage, just a cold, ugly, ember of poison that flares up in my gut every time I think about them. It’s the same way I feel about Princess Celestia, even if I know intellectually that she probably kept me from walking the path of the Warlock by trying to ascend when I didn’t deserve it she still fucking disowned me.

Every instance where I might have found a family, a home, or even just a place to call my own, has been ripped out from under me. Maybe I did sabotage myself here and there, but everything fell apart so badly this last time that I’m not sure there’s anything worth salvaging.

But this isn’t about me, and it doesn’t matter that this job I’m in is just glorified cover for me to keep a closer eye on what comes in and out of Emergency with Aria. I’m still responsible for the people who come in here.

“Well, that part isn't my business,” I continue finally. “Doctor Wellborn will want to see her again in a few days once he’s had time to go over the results of the study, but I’ve basically told you what he’s likely to say.”

“Thank you,” Twilight says quietly. “And thank you for keeping an eye on her tonight, too… it means she finally got some sleep. The Doctor did say he was putting her with his best sleep tech.”

I chuckle wanly at that. Doctor Wellborn has far too high of an opinion of me for the kinds of bullshit I get away with under his nose.

Twilight goes silent as she watches Applejack sleep through the glass wall of the observation room, and rather than follow her lead I find myself watching her instead.

‘She’s pretty,’ is my first thought.

It’s a humanising kind of prettiness; the kind where her hair isn’t quite all in place, leaving some of the lavender strands to fall over her glasses. The kind of pretty that you see when you wake up at eleven at night, look down at the woman in your arms and realise that you both fell asleep halfway through the movie you decided to watch for date night, and rather than wake her up, you just… watch.

Twilight looks tired, and a little careworn which I wager is probably from looking after Applejack, and she certainly looks worried.

But she’s also pretty.

Applejack is a lucky girl. I hope she realises that soon enough to snap out of wherever she is before she loses everything, or worse, takes this world’s Twilight down with her.

“Can I ask how you two met?” I say. At this point, I’m just satisfying idle curiosity. “You say she never leaves the farm, so…”

“I said ‘rarely’, actually,” Twilight replies, chuckling. “We met on her farm, though, so I guess that’s fair.” She tears her gaze away from Applejack to look back at me with a soft smile. “I was doing a self-directed study and my project involved testing soil samples from the surrounding areas of Canterlot, Sweet Apple Acres is one of the largest and most distant, so I saved it for last because I knew it would take a few weeks.”

“Ah,” I say, and can’t help but laugh a little, myself. That’s a very ‘Twilight’ set of circumstances. “I guess there was paperwork?”

“Mhm,” Twilight nods. “I needed permission from the landowner, and Applejack was very accommodating. She even let me stay at the farmhouse for the duration of my study so we spent a lot of time together… I’m a little surprised myself, but I really did fall for her.”

“Nice meet-cute,” I say with a grin, and Twilight blushes. “Better than mine, anyway.”

That’s a subterranean bar considering that I met Tempest in a rotting cornfield while running from a chainsaw-wielding mutant freakshow called ‘The Hillbilly’.

“She’s thoughtful, helpful, and… and she’s a good woman,” Twilight says quietly, her voice trailing off as she turns back to Applejack and sighs. “I really love her, you know?”

“I can tell,” I say.

I’m not actually sure if what I’m feeling is jealousy or pity. On the one hand, it’s a little irksome that Applejack found a normal, stable relationship with someone who cares this much about her wellbeing. On the other hand, it’s honestly sad to see how incapable she is of appreciating it.

Or… maybe it’s not that she doesn’t appreciate it. Maybe it’s that she’s too damaged to be capable of appreciating it like she ought to.

Well, I can relate to that, at least.

“Looks like she’s coming to,” Twilight says a bit more brightly, and sure enough, on the other side of the observation glass, Applejack is stirring.

I wince a little as she sits up. Applejack looks pretty bad. I’ve had a few occasions, especially when I was homeless, where I knew what it was like to hit the hay and actually sleep after a long time of not getting a full night’s rest. Her body probably feels like ten miles of bad road because her brain is still desperately trying to make up for the debt of sleep it feels it's owed.

Still, the daughter of Pear Butter and Bright Mac swings her legs off the side of the bed, yawns cavernously, then forces herself to stand up, albeit a bit shakily.

Before I can move, Twilight is past me and through the door to the room where Applejack had been asleep, and I follow her through a moment later with a wry chuckle on my lips.

“Okay, cowgirl, holdup,” I say, putting a hand up and gesturing for her to stop. “You’re still wired up to half the hospital, and I need you to answer a few questions before you go anywhere.”

“O-Oh, right, sorry ‘bout that,” Applejack says groggily as she looks down at herself, picking at the wires.

She sits back down and Twilight joins her on the bed, moving up next to her as I pull the nodes off of Applejack one by one. As I do I go through the boilerplate questionnaire, asking her the usual exit survey, mostly they’re just questions that boil down to how she feels now versus how she normally feels waking up at home so we have some variables to control for.

Once that’s out of the way it takes the industrious farmer all of about fifteen minutes to wash up, dress, and be ready to go.

“Thanks again, Doc—uh, Scar,” Applejack laughs quietly, then holds out her hand, and gives me that wide, guileless grin I remember so well. “Ah really appreciate y’all helpin’ me out here, and Ah’d like it if y’all’d come visit the farm some time fer dinner.”

I suppose that offer was probably inevitable, knowing the famous hospitality of the Apple clan as well as I do.

“I’ll definitely consider it,” I reply, as noncommittally as possible, then take her hand and give it a firm shake. “Just… take care of yourself, Jackie, okay?”

She blinks as the words come out of my mouth, and for a moment I see the shadow of grief fall over her again as her hand tightens considerably around mine.

Damn it. That was too much. That was too close to ‘Sunset Shimmer’, not ‘Scarlet Dream’. It’s hard to remember when I’m around Applejack that I’m supposed to be dead.

Sunset Shimmer is dead and Applejack killed her.

She and Rarity, and Pinkie, and Rainbow Dash, and Fluttershy all killed Sunset Shimmer. Or at the very least, they looked the other way while she died on her own, and maybe one is better than the other, but if that’s the case I don’t know what the difference is.

I’m still a corpse. A nightmare haunting a body that looks like someone that some people once called ‘friend’.

“Have a good rest of your day,” I say, forcing the words out as casually as possible. “I’ll forward your results to Doctor Wellborn, and his office should contact you to set up an appointment in the next day or two, okay?”

“Babe?” Twilight looks up at Applejack with concern etched on her brow. “Are you—?”

“Ah’m fine,” Applejack says a little too sharply, and she visibly reins herself in, sighs, and looks back down at Twilight. “Sorry, Twi’, just had some bad dreams, that’s all… Ah promise, Ah’m fine.”

Twilight frowns, but nods, then goes up on her toes again to kiss her girlfriend lightly on the cheek.

“Okay,” she says softly, and I’d bet neither I nor Applejack thinks she actually believes the young farmer, but none of us say a word. “Let’s go home.”

“Yeah, that sounds mighty fine t’me,” Applejack says.

Then she tips her stetson to me, smiles, and she’s gone from my office.

I wait a full sixty count to be sure she won’t come back after having forgotten something before collapsing back into my chair, smacking myself in the face with the clipboard, and loudly revisiting every single blasphemy and invective in my vocabulary.

It takes me a full ten minutes.

I have an extremely rich vocabulary.

“FUCK. ME!” I snarl the words as I slump over my desk. I’d chosen to end on an old favorite. “That was the most stressful night of work I’ve ever had… fuck!”

Forcing myself to my feet, I card my fingers through my hair and groan as I head back into the observation room to tidy everything up. Generally speaking, it’s the custodian’s job to take out the linens and everything but I usually do it just to make sure it gets done. Besides, I never have many people, and it’s not like it takes a long time… that’s probably one of the reasons Wiseline actually likes me so much.

I do his job for him.

All that’s left is to file my report and email it to Wellborn, which takes me all of about ten minutes since I’d done ninety percent of it while I was waiting for Applejack to wake up. I’m just shutting down the eldritch beast of aeons that is my computer, which runs on what I think is a cracked copy of Windows ME, when a knock sounds at the door, followed by Aria Blaze who’s toting a heavy-looking messenger bag.

“You ready to go yet, Red?” She asks, stifling a yawn of her own and adjusting the bag’s strap. “Because I’ve got a six-pack and two frozen pizzas calling my name back at Redhearts’.”

“How are you still so skinny?” I grumble as I stand up and kick my chair into place at my desk. “Seriously, I’ve got a literally demonic metabolism, what’s your excuse?”

“I dunno, wanna come over and do some cocaine while we try and figure it out?” Aria asks with a broad grin.

“Hilarious.” I elbow Aria in the ribs as I move past her, and she cackles while we walk out to her car.

“Anything new with the Fog collection scheme?” I ask, mostly to try and distract Aria from her own shitty sense of humor.

“Nah, it’ll take a couple days for ‘Hearts to work up a system,” Aria says, waving off the question. “But I do have some super exciting homework!”

“Why do I get the feeling this will be neither super nor exciting?” I groan as Aria opens the messenger bag revealing an absolute mass of thick manila folders.

“These,” Aria says proudly, “are redacted autopsy reports for every victim of the three suspected Killers from the past eight months.”

“Why?” I ask as I take a few and start thumbing through them.

“Well, we didn’t know what we were looking for before,” Aria says. “Now that we know for sure there’s a triplet of honest-to-Nodens Fogborn Killers out there, we can go through this shit and maybe get some new clues.”

“Is this legal?” I pick out a folder and eye it cautiously.

“Oh hell no,” Aria replies with a laugh. “But shit’s getting real so… fuck it?”

I laugh bitterly as we reach the car, and as I get into the passenger seat I open up the first folder and start paging through the contents.

“Fuck it, indeed,” I reply as I settle back for some gory late-stroke-early reading.

Author's Note

Regroup and reassemble.

Part of my Marathon Fundraiser to help with my move! If you can support it please visit my Patreon!

Interlude 1 - The Good Daughter

? ? ? ?

The smell of the Fog fades from my nostrils as I cut past the last threads of clinging reality and step into the Ugly World.

I miss home already. I miss the smell of it, and the quiet. I want to go back but I can’t. Father spent so much power to send me here. He’s counting on me to fix everything! He can’t send the others. They’re too old, too strong, and have too much of the Fog inside them to exist out here in the Ugly World for very long, and I don’t know how long this will take.

Only I can come out here.

I’m young, so I don’t have as much of the Fog in me. One day I will, though, and Father will be proud of me. He told me so.

My hand goes to my belt and brushes over the smooth bone handle of the knife that Father gave me when He made me new again. It’s cold and comforting, and the moment I touch it I can hear His whispers in my ears and all around me. Father is always with me, He always sees me, and He never forgets about His children.

Not even the worthless ones.

My jaw creaks as I grit my teeth in rage. I know what Father wants me to do, but I don’t know why.

Why does he want her back?

Why does she matter?

She left us! She stole from Father and abandoned her family in the Fog! And for what?! This place? She stole food from Father’s table, power from His grip, and a whole marble of reality! But Father still wants her back!

I blow out a calming breath.

Father wants her back because she’s His daughter and He loves her. That’s all. She doesn’t appreciate His love, but that’s because she’s stupid and mean and immature. She took advantage of Father, and anyone else would have thrown her out but Father is good and kind, and He loves His children.

I pull the knife from its sheath and hold it up to admire the fog-forged steel. I run my thumb along the edge, and a smile creases my face beneath the cold white mask.

Father trusts me. Father loves me. He needs me to do this right, and I will.

Find the Prodigal. Find the Harvester. Find the Thief. Find the Lock.

I let out another breath, this one shaky and cold as I sheathe the knife and take in my surroundings.

I’m right where I expected to be. Right where I always ended up when the Ugly World got especially ugly. Sweaters are still hanging from their old wire hooks, and the tiny space still smells like sweat and fear.

My sweat. My fear.

It’s a tiny space, maybe five feet long and three across. There’s barely enough room to fit anything of meaning in here, but before I was made new I was always so small and skinny. Frail and weak. I could fit easily.

After all, you can’t fit anything of meaning in here.

He always found me though. I always hid here, so he always found me, but there was nowhere else to hide, so he always found me.

Except… except once, when Father found me instead.

I don’t have to wonder why I came out here. Our memories are important, they’re powerful. Father taught me that. Memories are stronger than anything, they can change the world if you let them. My older brothers and sisters don’t have many memories left inside them anymore, but that doesn’t mean anything.

Their memories are outside of them now. They’re sunk into the coal-grit of the Ironworks, and the cattails of the Pale Rose. They’re in the long, empty streets of Haddonfield and the oil-soaked earth of the Scrapyard.

My memories are still inside me. They’re not in the Fog yet, but they will be, and then I’ll be stronger.

Til then, I still remember the little closet and the cramped room beyond. I still remember the sound of iron-hard fists hammering the door and the smell of alcohol. I still remember the empty-headed silence from the other room as she ignored everything.

Memories.

Father was right about memories. They’re very, very strong.

Taking one last deep breath, I put a black-gloved hand to the folding door of the closet, and push it open, and as I do I let the Fog fill my lungs, and bleed into my muscles and bones, from there I let it wrap around my heart and all of a sudden it goes still.

I’m not scared anymore, but all the same… please don’t see me.

I smile beneath the pale, silent scream of my mask. My new face that Father gave me. He told me what I have to do, and I’m so happy.

The room smells just like it used to. I wrinkle my nose in disgust. The smell of fear and rage is still staining the walls.

My fear. His rage.

I move past the bed, still unmade from the last time it was used. The desk is still messy with papers flung about when he threw me into it. Some of the papers are on the floor, and I lean down to collect them.

Stories. Just stories… meaningless words no one but would ever read or want to read. I run my fingers over the clumsy, hand-written sheaves, then tidy them all into a pile, set them on the desk, and turn the pencil cup right-side-up.

When I walk out of the room, the desk is tidy and pristine. All the papers, all the meaningless stories, are in order again and in neat little piles, and the pencils and pens are in their cups. I wonder what people will think when they see it after seeing everything else I’m about to do in this place.

The hallway is narrow and tight, but the whole house is cramped so it fits. Everything about this place always seemed like it wanted to close in on you.

I know it was built sometime in the sixties, so it’s not the oldest house, but it is probably one of the more poorly kept ones. It’s not really the type of house that’s worth renovating, and its owners don’t have the skill, the money, or the desire to fix anything. Nothing about this house feels like a home, and even ignoring the people in it I always had the feeling that this wasn’t a house that welcomed people to live there.

Before, that feeling had made coming back just one more weight dragging me down. Now, though, I kind of like it. The house… it really does resent us, and that appeals to me. It’s got a personality that says it ought to have been torn down decades ago and quietly begrudges us for not doing so.

Thick, glutinous snores come from the den at the end of the hall, and behind those sounds is the clinking of dishes and running water from a faucet with bad pressure coming from the kitchen beyond.

It’s quiet other than that, but in a bad way. There’s a lot of different kinds of silence, but the kind that always seems to hang around here is the tense kind. It’s the type of silence where you know something bad is going to happen, even if you don’t know when or what, or how bad it will be, you can feel it in the well of your gut and deep in your bones. You can taste it in the back of your throat.

I look over the living room, ignoring the snores and the muffled sounds of the news from the television that’s been turned down to a low volume so it won’t wake the fat man up. She always did that once he passed out. He’s easier to manage when he’s unconscious.

There are pictures on the walls, but only a few. and none of them are of me.

There never were, though. Not that I can remember, anyway.

I move past the sleeping man and towards the dull spill of fluorescent yellow light coming from the kitchen. Dishes are still clinking, water is still running, but she wouldn’t hear me anyway even if those sounds weren’t covering up my footsteps.

Momma’s very, very good at not hearing things, you see.

I step into the light and look into the kitchen. Momma has her back to me, her loose, ragged green hair, so much like mine, is up in a messy bun. Her shoulders are a little stooped, but they’ve been that way as long as I can remember. I never thought about it before but now I see it.

She’s beaten. Broken.

Empty.

I lay my hand on the handle of my knife, feeling the smooth bone of the grip through the unnatural fabric of the black glove, and slowly draw the blade loose. It doesn’t catch the light despite how bright it is. The blade looks like silver, but it’s not. It’s made from something else.

If momma turns around now, she’ll see me. She’ll see my new face, the face of her daughter’s Ghost.

But only if she turns around.

I tighten my grip on the handle. It’s so tight I can practically hear the creak of the grip. My memories are still inside me, and I hate them. I hate them!

She never looked. Never watched. Never stopped any of it.

My vision washes red, outlining her in bloody crimson. I can taste the Fog inside of her the way Father taught me to. He told me I would need the Fog to stay strong out here. I still need at least a little bit now and again, not as much as my older brothers and sisters would, but I still need it.

That’s why Father taught me how to see it. Then he taught me how to take it.

I could take her Fog. Spill momma’s memories onto the kitchen floor. Maybe she would want to stop the hurting then, huh? Maybe then?! WOULD IT MATTER THEN!?

Beneath my mask, I feel the moment I find the Fog. It’s a subtle pressure, a sense of knowing, and a taste like ash and copper in the back of my throat. Momma is glowing red. She’s so red, and her Fog is the reddest of all.

A muffled sob splits through my concentration and the red wash of light vanishes.

She’s shaking, I realise. Momma’s hands are shaking. One is gripping a filthy plate and holding it under the hot water, the other is holding a dirty sponge, abrasive side down, and she’s dragging it across the plate in jittery, halting motions.

I tilt my head, just a little.

Just enough to see all the bruises on her face.

She’s trying to cry quietly. She stays quiet because she doesn’t want to wake him up. I know exactly what she’s thinking too while she scrubs away at the dishes.

Please don’t see me.

For a brief, brief moment, my heart beats. Just once. A single beat strikes the inside of my ribcage as I turn away from momma and step out of the sickly spill of fluorescent light. I hear the dish clatter into the sink. I’m sure she heard the heartbeat, the thunder of a Killer’s heart when it’s so close to you is impossible to ignore.

“H-Hello?”

Her voice is familiar. A soft, squeaking whisper that’s so used to being quiet that I’m not sure she knows how to be loud anymore.

I listen for her footsteps and stay just out of her sight as she steps out from the kitchen and looks around. I stay around the corner, close to the back door where there are bags of garbage waiting to be taken out.

The gentle padding of her feet moves gingerly through the den. She won’t wake him if she can help it, so she moves slowly. Slowly enough for me to step into the kitchen from the side as momma goes to the back door.

It has a screen door that always creaks when it’s opened, so momma opens it slowly while I leave the kitchen and circle back into the den behind her. I listen to her pull the screen door clear and then open the back door, and as she distracts herself with that, I stare down at him.

This is not my father. My real ‘Father’ loves me. He made me strong. This thing snoring through a throat scorched with cheap liquor and cigarettes isn’t my father.

I find his Fog with that subtle snap of pressure. It’s red and clinging to his fat-caked heart. I know how to reach it and how to take it out of him. It’s not even all that hard, really. I put the knife to his throat, press hard, and with a single sharp jerk I take out the Fog.

Momma is still looking out the back door while the fat man twitches spasmodically in his favorite chair. He doesn’t thrash. He can’t. I’m holding him down because now… now I’m the strong one. I’m stronger than he is because I’m better.

Father made me better.

I pull the knife free. Wipe it clean. And sheathe it, breathing deep as I do to draw the Fog into my lungs, capturing it there for later.

I’ll have to take more eventually, but there are always more people like him.

Like the fat man who isn’t my father.

I step away from him, absurdly pleased that his ugly snoring is finally gone, and circle back around through the kitchen.

“H-Honey?”

She’s noticed that he’s stopped snoring. She’s scared he’s woken up. Scared that she woke him up. She leaves the back door open, with the screen door locked by the catch near the top of the doorjamb, as she goes back to check on him. To calm him down, get him another beer, and hope he passes out again. She’ll say she was just taking the garbage out, and apologise for waking him up.

I’m already out the back door by the time she starts screaming.

Maybe momma will be better now. Probably not, though. Maybe she’ll forget she saw anything at all.

She’s very good at not seeing, after all.

But I have a job to do. Father needs me.

The Prodigal. The Harvester. The Thief. The Lock.

I don’t know about the last two, but I might be able to find the first couple. The first one especially because even as much as I resent her, I’m looking forward to it a little bit.

Sunset Shimmer.

Author's Note

Follows the events of Please Don't See Me

Part of my Marathon Fundraiser to help with my move! If you can support it please visit my Patreon!

1.6

Three days.

It takes us three days to figure out one of the things we’d been missing. I’m not even one hundred percent certain I know the real meaning of what we found, beyond the fact that it bodes very badly for us.

Of the twenty-three reports out of Canterlot General, eight of them belong to the Legion counting the two in the Canal.

“Eight kills, no hook wounds, though,” I mutter as I pore over the files. “All of them are pretty much the same… deep, ragged wounds from a variety of cutting implements, some probably hand-fashioned, others not.”

Aria nods as she flips open one of the Ogre’s kills and grimaces.

It must be bad if even Aria flinches.

There’s a reason those particular killings gained traction in the media. Despite the fact that the victims of the Ogre have all been gangbanger garbage with rap sheets long enough to mummify them, the way they’ve been taken out isn’t something I’d necessarily wish on anyone.

Savagely beaten to death.

The sheer amount of blunt force trauma inflicted on them rendered most of them impossible to identify by anything but their teeth, and sometimes not even then.

“Mm, gross,” Redheart says, peeking over Aria’s shoulder. “That’s the Ogre’s work, right? I’ve seen the reports… not that I’m necessarily complaining.”

The Director had been kind enough to let us work in her apartment. It was roomier than the one I share with Tempest, Sour, and Starlight, and let us sprawl out our little web of conspiracy theories a little more evenly.

“Tempest was a banger too,” Aria says pointedly, and it’s my turn to grimace.

“She’s different,” I say quietly. “Even she knew it.”

Aria shakes her head and keeps flipping through the papers.

“So,” I continue. “Let’s assume that there are just three of the Legion for now, and each one has their own tool since Killers tend to stick to their favorites.”

“Fair,” Aria allows.

We divvy up the Legion’s reports and start sifting through them. It takes hours but we finally put together enough of a picture that we can confirm our suspicions within reason. There are probably only three, is what it comes out to. The morgue reports noted the various cutting tools and police investigation assumed that the use of those different weapons had some kind of ritual value to the Legion.

Probably that was out of a combination of the not wanting to think about having a small posse of murder-hobos, and because there was no evidence of there being more than one ‘Legion’ killer in spite of the name.

But there are only three notably different implements, after a fashion.

One of them uses blades, like hunting knives or skinning knives. One of them uses hand-made weapons that are as crude as they are deadly. One of them uses repurposed tools, things you might find in a high school shop class.

They don’t always use the same weapons but they still use the same categories, so it’s understandable that the investigators never caught on to the difference. It’s a habit that all Fogborn Killers have. The Wraith has a motley collection of scythes, and even Adagio had a few different axes.

“Well, it could be worse,” I say as I close up the last Legion file.

“Three is worse than one,” Aria counters.

“Better than five.”

Aria frowns as she leans back in her chair and moves a pile of reports from the Ogre killings back in front of her.

“We don’t know that the Ogre isn’t Fogborn.” She taps the reports pointedly. “We don’t even know if the ten deaths on file for the Ogre are all of them! It’s the East End! No one gives a shit about that place!”

“I used to live there, Ari’, I’m aware,” I reply flatly.

“Fair.”

“Besides, the ‘Ogre’ sounds more like some cop went off his nut and decided to go Punisher on some of the gangs,” I say, waving it off. “Seriously, they were beaten to death with crowbars and baseball bats.”

“And the Narc?” Aria asks quietly.

I blow out a quiet sigh. That was the bigger question. The Narc was a weird one, no doubt. Most serial killers have a preferred hunting ground and the Narc was no different. They hit the club scene hard. Pushers, dealers, anyone connected to the drug scene whether it was the hard stuff or just some molly, was a potential target.

Five kills total; three club pushers, one street dealer, and one higher-up supplier, and they were all found dead in places they probably shouldn’t have been. In locked rooms, back alleys that were nowhere near the last place they were seen… hell, the street dealer was killed on the crapper. All of them were beaten bloody which almost made the cops think it was the Ogre’s work at first, but the weird part was that they all had the same unique wound: a puncture from some kind of needle plunged into their heart. Redheart and Aria identified it as definitely a syringe of some kind, but no one can tell what was extracted.

Blood, maybe.

Some kind of trophy?

That’s what the cops think, but I’m not so sanguine about that. I think they might be pulling something else out.

“Of the three, we know the Legion is Fogborn now,” I say. “And the Narc is the next highest possibility.

“Whoever they are has a grudge,” Redheart says softly.

“Every Killer does if you look close enough,” I reply dryly. “Even human ones.”

“The question,” Aria says, leaning forward, “is whether or not we’re dealing with a capital ‘K’ Killer, or some pissed off vigilante.”

“I know which one I’d rather it be,” I say, earning a chorus of agreement.

None of us wanted this. When I brought everyone out of the Trials I thought that would be the end of it. The Entity stays in its lane, my friends stay in theirs, and everything goes back to a semblance of normalcy.

Except that’s not what happened. Even assuming the Thief was making things worse, I’m pretty sure everything happening here is ultimately my fault. No one had ever, to my knowledge, escaped the Entity’s clutches before. Certainly, no Killer had ever gone rogue, much less roped multiple other Killers into their mutiny. For all I know, all rescuing my friends did was let the Fog into the real world for good.

“Hey, Red, look at this…” Aria says, her voice taking on a suspicious tone that I don’t like at all.

“What?” I lean over to look at a pair of pictures Aria is holding up, while Redheart looms in between us to examine them too. “What am I looking for?”

“This wound, here,” Aria says, pointing to deep ragged punctures in the backs of two different victims.

I squint at them, trying to get a feel for what kind of blade could make that wound, but nothing comes to mind.

“It’s too wide for a blade,” Redheart says my thoughts out loud. “Too deep, too.”

An unpleasant knot snarls up in my stomach.

“Hand me that file,” I say, pointing to one of the ones she’d taken one of the pictures from.

Aria passes it over to me and I start flipping through the pictures, ignoring the bodies that we’d been focusing on and looking at the scene itself. Two died here; one male, one female. Both in their mid-twenties. The guy died first, and badly… there was more of his blood on the ground than in his body when the investigators got there.

The woman died quicker, but…

“Look.” I point to a section of the scene I hadn’t paid any attention to. It was right at the heels of the dead woman’s boots. “Scrape marks.”

“She tried to run,” Aria says quietly. “But they caught her and dragged her back, right?”

“Why would they?!” I snap. “The one I saw just ran down that jogger like a jackal and bore her to the ground. Why drag her back? Why not chase her down, kill her there, and then go?”

All three of us stare at the unsettling drag marks for a long moment as we let the idea simmer. I like absolutely nothing about what those marks suggest, but I don’t want to say it. I don’t want to because if I do, then it gets a lot more real and we’re in a lot more trouble.

“You said the Thief can’t control them, and they’re like wild animals, right?” Redheart asks softly.

“Yeah, at least the one I saw was,” I reply cautiously. “Why?”

Redheart reaches between us and turns the picture of the crime scene so she can see it more clearly, and grimaces.

“So what if they have a handler?” Redheart continues, her mouth hardening to a flat, strained line. “Another, more stable Killer that can travel the Fog to keep an eye on them… to make sure they don’t get out of hand, and to keep any of their kills from escaping in case they get tunnel vision.”

Aria and I both lean back in our chairs and stare at the files for a long moment before Aria sums up what all three of us are thinking as succinctly as possible.

“Fuck.”

Things just got a lot more complicated.

Tempest is gone when I get home.

She’s probably working, but I can never remember her shifts anymore. She picks up extra ones on and off and lately she’s been spending more and more of her time out of the apartment. I can feel us drifting apart, which seems so absurd considering the lengths I went to save her and how strong that bond felt.

Now, though... things are different. They feel different. We aren't fighting for our lives every second of every day anymore. We aren't stuck in a constant cycle of sleep, survive, repeat, wondering if the next time we get put on a hook and sent up to the Old Stain will be our last.

A note on the table tells me that Sour Sweet and Starlight are on a date, so at least someone in this damn city is having a good time tonight. Briefly, I consider calling them and telling them what we learned but there’s no real rush. It’s not like Canterlot is going to get less murder-y if I let them have this one night to be happy before ruining their day tomorrow.

Yeah, fuck it, I’ll just tell them tomorrow.

I pass the kitchen. I’m not hungry. I rarely ever am, and I can’t help but wonder if that’s more of my Killer biology. I still eat, but… I wonder sometimes if I even have to anymore. I highly doubt the Trapper packs a sack lunch every day.

Instead, I head to mine and Tempest’s room, dress down to my skivvies, and slip into bed.

The ease of practice steadies my breathing. In and out. In and out… I count down through the Enumerations of Dusk, stepping deeper and deeper into the soft, gray depths of the Dreamtime. I let the Fog curl around me, drawing me slowly out of my body, as I count down and down and down to the tune of a lullaby.

“One, two, Sunny’s coming for you~”

I cut my way out of the false skin of my waking disguise, slicing through the cheap flesh and peeling myself out of the confines of Sunset Shimmer, and draw a long, deep breath of Fog into my real lungs.

The Nightmare is awake and restless.

Really, I just need a break. I need to clear my head and clearing my head means taking a walk in my ‘real’ skin, something that I can’t help but wonder if Tempest is starting to get suspicious about. Maybe that’s why she’s putting distance between us… she knows I’m hiding something from her, but doesn’t know how to get it out of me.

It’s been this way ever since I got back.

Partially it’s because I think she knows that I don’t really sleep. I can’t sleep. Not anymore… not since I got back from the Entity’s Trials. I still get tired, but I don’t ever sleep. I’ve spoken to Adagio and Sonata about it a few times and apparently they can sleep just fine. As near as any of us can figure, the no-sleep problem is a ‘me’ thing.

It probably has something to do with my power. Sleeping is tied to my Oneiromancy, obviously, so maybe it’s just my nature now. If only I didn’t still get tired, that would really be nice. Then the no sleeping would actually be a benefit but hey, we can’t have that.

That would be too convenient.

Now, when I sleep, it’s like the half-rest I used to get when I was at the campfire between Trials. A kind of drifting malaise that makes time go faster and leaves me feeling rested but not really… refreshed.

I only get that when I use my power.

So I reach out for the distant lights of downtown Canterlot, then up towards the roof of Canterlot General, and dig my claws into the folds of space.

A sensation of weightlessness always accompanies my movement through the dream, especially when I go longer distances. I let myself become insubstantial, and then, almost like a liquid, I bleed through the skin of the Dreamtime and out where I was aiming for.

The brisk night air of Canterlot is faint here in the city’s dreaming reflection, but it’s still cold. Canterlot is a cold city, after all. I walk to the edge of the roof and sit down, crossing one leg over the other, and stare out over the city. The cold barely touches my fever-hot skin

Canterlot really is a beautiful city at night. From a distance it’s like a cavern filled with natural rock formations that are studded with jewels. The dreams are the best part though. I can feel them all… every mind across the span of the city that’s wrapped in slumber is within my grasp. It would be so easy to slip in and out of those dreams, haunt them… hunt them.

To be what I was meant to be.

“Why are you such a bastard, you Old Stain?” I mutter as I flop onto my back and stare up at the twisting gray sky.

I raise both of my hands above my head and admire how the dim light reflects off of my claws. I love my claws. They’re probably my favorite part of me. I’ve always been vain, it’s a personal foible, but that vanity doesn’t seem to be displeased by my ‘Killer’ appearance. Despite not being in any way attractive, I still… I like it.

I like how I look.

Maybe I just like looking terrifying.

Terrifying things are a lot less likely to be hunted. Killers don’t get hunted, we are the hunters.

A sigh escapes me as I sit up, then get to my feet and stare out towards the west where the line of the city terminates into rolling hills.

Another thing that’s been on my mind a lot lately, which I’ve studiously not mentioned to the others, is the slender string of topaz light I keep seeing. It’s been there ever since Applejack left the sleep clinic. It's infinitely faint and incredibly weak, but it’s definitely there. I think it’s always been there, but I just can’t ignore it now and, even worse, it’s not the only one.

The others are there too if I look for them.

Strings of light. Strands of energy in shades of sapphire, rose, opal, citrine, and topaz stretching out into the city. If I follow one of those strands, I know exactly what I’ll find at the end of it. Or rather, who.

I wrap my arms around myself as I stare out over the skyline.

Not even Harmony can let me go.

Why can’t everyone just move on? Why can’t they just accept that I’m gone and fuck off? I’m dead. End of story. Maybe I deserved to die and maybe I didn’t, but whatever the case, I’m a priest of the Entity now, no matter how I try to fool myself.

I will always be a Killer. I will always be this way.

A monster.

And speaking of monsters...

"Please don't let it be them," I whisper, closing my eyes.

The Legion is three. All of similar build and with a close bond. True, Canterlot is one of the populous cities in the nation. It could be any group of people who were caught out by the Thief and then modified, but my gut feeling was so much worse than that. If it is them, it's going to break Tempest's heart. She did so much to rescue them and to have things end like this is just too cruel.

Even if I hate them.

My dark musings are cut short as something ripples through the air of the Dreamtime, and I frown as I reach out for it. It’s gone now but something definitely disturbed the fabric of space for a split-second.

“What the—” I extend my arm, close my eyes, and focus.

I don’t know who the Thief is, but in the end that’s all they are… a Thief. They aren’t the rightful successor to the power of the Fog, they are not a son or daughter of the Entity, and they’ll never understand it quite like a true Fogborn.

All of that means that they probably have no idea that I can feel that Fog they just conjured fading away.

Written’s Quill that’s quick. Even considering my nature, if I hadn’t been out here and paying attention I would have missed it entirely. Whoever stole the Entity’s power might be a thief but they’re no slouch, that’s for sure.

That was… what? A five- or six-second window?

A handful of seconds between conjuring and fading. That’s a damn good level of efficiency for a practised magi, to say nothing of a novice human.

“Maybe I’m just getting lucky.” A grin stretches across my lips, exposing sharp, jagged teeth. “Let’s see who’s picking at the skin of my city.”

I stand and take a deep breath of the icy, Canterlot winds before spreading my arms, tipping forward, and dropping straight down from the top of the hospital.

The wind roars past me as I plummet ten stories, laughing all the way as I flicker through the phases of reality. Each flicker alters my angle of descent and velocity, bleeding my momentum into the nothingness of the void between realities here and there until I land with a dull thump on the concrete, none the worse for the wear and feeling significantly better about my night already.

“Whoever you are,” I snarl as I take one step and cross half a kilometer, “you’re not welcome in my world.”

The Dreamtime of Canterlot is mine. There’s nothing in the world that can touch me here.

Here I’m practically a goddess.

Here… here I’m safe.

Every step passes whole city blocks as I drag the Fog around me. I may not have the same control over it as the Old Stain, but the Dreamtime has always been saturated in the Fog. It’s part of who I am and part of where I belong, and so I can control to an extent.

Unlike my more visceral cousins, I can bleed in and out of existence with a little Fog and even less effort. Maybe that’s another reason my lungs are filled with the stuff. Maybe I’m as much ‘Fog’ as I am ‘person’ now.

Either way, it bodes very poorly for whoever’s been cutting up the citizens of my city.

A scream, pitched high with agony, cuts through the night, and I grit my teeth as I pick up speed towards the source. It’s an alley at the border of the Commons several blocks down from the East End. Here things are still run down and ratty but in an aesthetic way. This is a slightly nicer part of Old Town Canterlot, where the city still carries some of that charming nostalgia of days gone by.

Nostalgia which is marred somewhat by the stink of blood.

The smell is always so much stronger in the Dreamtime.

“Help!” A voice sobs and blubbers, and I grimace at the pitiful noise as I step around the corner of the alley.

The bottom drops out of my stomach as I find the source of the screams. A young man, maybe eighteen, not much younger than me or my friends, is hanging from a butcher’s hook that’s protruding out of the wall of the alley on a misshapen arm of melted stone and rusted iron that stretches out a half meter before terminating in a heavy chain.

“Someone! P-Please!” The man sobs. “SOMEBODY! ANYBODY!”

Good luck… the Fog is probably hedging anyone else out of this place.

I scan the area before slipping into the alley itself. No sign of the Legion or their handler, assuming such a being exists. Satisfied that the coast is clear, I look to the poor dumb sacrificial lamb himself.

He’s tall and narrow, with a pale grayish teal complexion, and ragged mane of gold-blonde hair. He’s wearing a thick sweater that’s stained with his blood, and my stomach does a flip as I realise what he’s about to do the moment he reaches up to grab onto part of the chain that’s holding him.

“DON’T!” I snarl.

The man lets out a startled cry that turns into a gasp of pain as he jerks, jostling the hook that’s punched through his skin.

“Don’t touch the chain!” I bark. “Don’t try to get out… you’ll just make it easier on them.”

“W-Where…?” He’s looking around frantically, and I realise after a moment that he can’t see me. I’m still between dreams and the Real.

The only reason he can hear me at all is probably because of the Fog that’s around us.

“I’m in front of you, hold on,” I say quietly.

His mind isn’t so much a fortress as it is a kitschy cafe. There’s no defense whatsoever, and with a brush of my claws I slip my power through his fear-soaked brain, sink my metaphorical teeth into that little cluster of nerves between his amygdala and pineal gland, and shove him hard into the realm of sleep.

Laughter bubbles out of me as his eyes glaze and cross, then focus again. The moment his eyes fall on me he recoils with a terrified shout.

“W-What the fu—!?”

“Shut up!” I snap. “Who did this to you?”

He stares at me in terror for a few short seconds, before dropping into blubbering sobs again. “I don’t know! I was walking home and… and I saw I was being followed by someone in a hoodie! I got scared and ran!”

I raise an eyebrow.

“You got scared and ran?” I repeat slowly. “From… what you thought… was a normal person in a hoodie?”

“It might’ve been a mugger or a thug!” He snaps, and lets out another cry of pain from the hook.

Ah, okay, so he’s a bigot. At the very least a classist shitheel. Not that he was wrong in this particular case, but the fact that his first assumption to someone existing near him in a less nice part of town was that they were a criminal didn’t exactly endear him to me.

“Okay, fuckwad, let’s just—” I reach out to grab him, intending to take him down off of the hook.

I don’t manage to get more than a few inches closer to him before something in my hindbrain starts shrieking warning klaxons and jamming red-hot pokers directly into the pain centers of my brain!

“AH FUCK!” I scramble back, gripping my skull and staggering as I drop to a knee.

The pain is gone in an instant. Not even a shadow of soreness remains, just the memory of agony and a cold fear in my chest as I stare up at the startled young man bleeding on the hook.

“What the…” I start to reach out again towards him, intent on trying again and- “AUGH! SHIT!”

White, blinding pain shoots through me again, and an awful notion occurs to me.

It’s the Hook. I can’t get him off of the Hook because of what I am. It’s literally hardwired into my biology to throw my prey onto these hooks but I’ve never once tried to get someone off of one. At least, I’ve never tried to do it after I got converted.

“What are you doing?!” He hisses. “Help me!”

“I… I can’t…” I mumble as I stare down at my clawed hands. “I can’t… I can’t get you off the hook.”

What little color is left in his face leaves it. I had never considered what it might mean for a Killer to try and save a Survivor. It hadn’t even occurred to me that it might be impossible even though, thinking rationally, of course I would be designed that way. Me and all of my murderous cousins. The master key of our genetics is held by an eldritch horror that feeds on hope, how could I have possibly thought it would be otherwise?

There’s no place for mercy in the soul of a Killer.

No… the Entity wouldn’t have allowed even the hint of a possibility that that might come into play. I only cheated him that one time because I balanced his dark magic with pure Equestrian magic siphoned through my journal. That ace had been played, though… now I was beholden to the full limits of my biology.

“What do you mean you can’t?!” He all but shrieks. “Get me off of this fucking thing!”

“I CAN’T!” I scream back at him. “I can’t touch you! I… w-wait… do you have a phone?!”

“What?”

I ignore him and approach the hook again, pointedly not looking at, or thinking about touching him in any way that might trigger the subtle geas that’s locking me out from saving him.

The outline of a phone is right there in his pocket. I can get it open, get his password, and call for help. The only problem is… I’m not tangible.

I’ve never gone ‘full Killer’ since I came back. I’ve never had to. I’ve always been content with wandering in astral form. Now, though, I need to be able to affect the physical world.

It’s a massive risk, but I can’t just watch him die. Even if he’s kind of a tool, no one deserves to be slaughtered like this. Even putting that aside, I can’t afford to let the Thief enhance their powers by feeding off of him. I can’t let the sacrifice ritual finish.

Taking a deep breath, I draw the Fog that suffuses the Dreamtime deep into my lungs. I let it saturate my body, filling my bone, muscle, and sinew with delicious sensation. My physical senses explode outward from me as the real world comes rushing in with the force of a sledgehammer, and my legs almost go weak with delirium.

It’s overwhelming. Everything is so real. The scent of blood is like olfactory gold, and it’s everywhere, but more than that… this city is impossibly bright.

Hope. Light. Desire. Hatred. Violence. Bloodshed.

I can taste it all. I can feel it all. It makes me want to dig my claws into the skin of this city and watch it bleed out all over my hands. I want to—

...I—

It takes a monumental effort of will, but I manage to scrounge back some semblance of control as I finally punch all the way through from the Dreamtime and into the Real. My physical, human body is still slumbering at home, but my true form, my fog-forged Killer body, is now wonderfully solid.

I never knew it could feel this good.

“Okay, focus… focus,” I say carefully as I reach into his pocket and draw out his phone. I have to do it with the most minute of touches. I can’t risk shattering it.

Cradling the device in my hand, I use my knuckles to tap the phone out of sleep mode, then hold it up to the young man. “Here, put in your password!”

He swallows and nods, reaches out, and taps out his password onto the screen. I ignore all of the notifications, open up the Call app, and dial Tempest’s number.

“C’mon… c’mon…” I mutter.

It goes to voicemail.

“SHIT!”

Damn it Tempest, what a time to fucking screen your calls. I tap back into the call app and dial Aria’s number; she’s probably still awake, but odds are good she’s in bed with Redheart. Hopefully I’m not disturbing anything intimate, but at this point it’s literally life or death.

//Who the fuck is this?// Aria’s voice comes through an instant after the line connects.

“It’s me, Ari’! We’ve got a problem!” I snap. “The Legion has someone on the hook and I can’t get him down! You’ve got to get over here and bring backup!”

//Wait… w—fuckit, gimme the address!// Bless you, Aria.

I rattle off the cross-street and a few landmarks, then hang up

All I can do is pray they have time to make it.

Back in the Trials a hooked Survivor wouldn’t last more than a couple of minutes, but that clearly wasn’t the case here. Most likely, these hooks aren’t at full power. They’re facsimiles, and moreover, they’re crude and half-formed. If I was lucky that meant it would take a lot longer for someone to be drained.

“Just hold on,” I say as I put his phone back in his pocket. “My team is on their way.”

He sniffles quietly and nods. He must be in a lot of pain but he’s keeping it together impressively, although I’m sure part of that is shock.

“What’s your name?” I ask. All I can think to do is to try and distract him while I keep watch.

“Z-Zephyr,” he says weakly. “Zephyr Breeze.”

“Nice to meet you Zephyr,” I reply. “I can’t tell you my name, but I’ll tell you I’ve been doing this a while, and I won’t let them take you, okay?”

“W-What are they?” He sobs.

“Killers is what we call them,” I explain. “I’ll bet, right before they took you down, you heard something, right? A loud, thundering heartbeat in your ears?”

He nods

“Good.” That actually helps. It means they’re basically running off the same biological programming. “That’s the sound of the Killer’s heartbeat in your ears. The louder it is, the closer they are, so if you hear it again, run.”

He nods again, a little more frantically this time.

“Do you have somewhere to go once we get you down?” I ask. “An apartment?”

“I… I live with my parents,” he says a little sheepishly.

I roll my eyes. Of course he does. Technically, there’s nothing wrong with that, but with him I get the feeling that it’s more out of inertia and laziness than it is necessity.

“That’s good.” Is what I actually say. “Family is good… it’s harder for them to go to places where there’s real love. Is it just your mom and dad?”

“Yeah, my sister moved out with a friend after she graduated, s-so it’s just us,” Zephyr says. “I… I think she lives in the Commons close by, though.”

He’s a talker. That doesn’t surprise me, really. He strikes me as the type to babble, mostly about himself, but right now he’s scared and panicky. I need him to calm down, because if we get him free and he bolts, that's just begging for a double-hook.

“You on good terms with your sister?” I ask idly.

He shrugs, then winces, and I have to hold back a chuckle.

“Uhm, n-not really,” he admits quietly. “I… She’s amazing, and I… I always felt like she was better than me at everything.”

His fear starts falling into quiet sobs. I know what he’s feeling now. Regret… he’s feeling regret for his life. He’s being forced to stare his very real mortality in the face, or possibly a fate worse than death, and suddenly poor Zephyr is realising he might just be a useless sack of crap.

“I’m just a drain on everyone, a-and my sister and my parents are always trying to help me, and get me to make something of myself b-but I’m s-scared.” He starts to shake and cry, and I can feel him crumbling. “I w-want to make them proud! I want my sister to be proud of me! But I’m useless! I can’t do anything right and if I try I’ll j-just f-fail!”

I know that feeling all too well. The terror of failure. The fear of disappointing the people who mean the most to you. I reacted to it by becoming a ruthless, cutthroat bitch who did anything and everything necessary to succeed, and damn the cost. Zephyr reacted to it by shutting down, because if you never try you’ll never fail.

As galling as it is to admit, Zephyr and I are two sides of a coin.

“Then I guess you’ll have to live to change that,” I say firmly, and Zephyr stares back at me through bloodshot, teary eyes. “If you want your sister and your parents to be proud of you! Live! Live and go do something incredible! Who gives a shit if you fail once, or twice, or a million times! If you want to do it, then do it!” I jerk a hand out to gesture at the alleyway. “Or else I promise, one day, you’ll end up right back here! Dying useless and alone.”

Just like me.

He sniffles, then nods, and gives me a weak smile. “I… y-yeah.”

Despite myself, I smile, and I know it must look awful, but he doesn’t flinch away. There’s some steel in his backbone, I guess.

“You should talk to your sister after this,” I say softly. “Reconnect… take it from someone with no family, okay? Cherish what you have.”

“I will,” he says, and there’s more bite in his words now.

“What’s she like?” I ask. For better or worse, I actually feel a little invested in this loser. “Your sister I mean, what’s her name? What does she do?”

“Oh, she’s… she’s probably the sweetest person ever,” Zephyr says, still sniffling a little. “She’s going to college to be a therapist, and she’s looking after her best friend at the same time…” Something about that tickles something in the back of my mind. A premonition of familiarity. “Her name is Fluttershy.”

Ice floods my veins at the same time that my own heartbeat suddenly deafens me. Fluttershy…

You aren’t our friend! You never were!

Her voice rings in my ears, bright and accusatory, and for a brief moment I’m back in the halls of Canterlot High. I’m on my knees, surrounded by the girls who had, just days ago, called me family. They’re glaring down at me with betrayal in their eyes and curses on their lips.

Kind Fluttershy and her cruel words.

Loyal Rainbow Dash, abandoning me where I had collapsed.

Honest Applejack, who couldn’t see past the lies.

Generous Rarity, without a single word of comfort to give.

Joyful Pinkie Pie who couldn’t muster a smile to save a life.

First Applejack, now Fluttershy’s brother… something is happening. I can feel it. Something is tugging on the strings of Harmony and I’m getting caught up in it. I can’t let this go any further. I can’t let them find out that I’m—

My train of thought derails as Zephyr goes rigid and starts looking around like a startled rabbit.

I don’t need to ask, so I just say it.

“The heartbeat.”

They're coming back.

Author's Note

Brigands have the run of these lanes.

Part of my Marathon Fundraiser to help with my move! If you can support it please visit my Patreon!

1.7

“How loud?” I ask.

Zephyr doesn’t answer right away, he just shakes and makes these frustrating little mewling sounds of terror.

“HEY!” I snap my fingers in front of him. The noise is a flanged screech of metal that jars him out of his stupor. “How. Loud?”

“Uh-Uhm, q-quiet… but it’s getting louder!” He says. “Where are your friends?!”

“On their way, just hang tight,” I flash him a grin with a level of confidence I’m not sure I’m feeling. “They won’t get you.”

I turn on my heel and snap my hands out wide, brandishing my claws and baring my ragged teeth like an animal.

“Please… please!” Zephyr moans.

His tepid and terrified voice grates on my nerves. My instincts say ‘Kill’. They tell me to end him. To rattle the hook and the chain. To ring the dinner bell for the Old Stain. It won’t be the Entity that comes if I do though, oh no.

No, it will be the Thief.

It will be the one who stole from the Old Stain. Who took its power like jewels from a trove only to fritter them away on meaninglessness.

My mind is buzzing as a figure steps into view at the far end of the alley. Their baggy clothes obscure their outline, but I still recognise them. I know them from the dead vagrant’s memories. The stained denim jacket over a thin hoodie and a mask of old stained plaster with two crude circles with notches down the center where eyes would be, and a crude painted grin for a mouth.

Silently, they pull out a hunting knife from a leather sheathe at their hip. It’s an old one, heavy and made of good, solid steel. The kind of hunting knife you'd use to skin a deer or cut through leather. It's the kind of knife that could slice through flesh and bone alike with enough effort. It's also the kind of thing an overly-edgy teenager might threaten someone with, but the way the figure spins the blade on the palm of their hand tells me this isn’t one of those types of people. The weapon is balanced, and the one holding it moves with a fluid, violent economy of motion that suggests they know exactly what they’re going to do with it.

"Is it you?" I ask.

They take one step forward, silent and menacing, then another.

"Damn it, Apple Bloom is that you under there?!"

I barely see the third step. One moment they’re approaching with careful stalking movement, and the next they’re in my face, their bloody blade caught in the metal net of my fingers to grind against them with unnerving power and mad, frothing grit. Their breath comes in sharp, rapid gasps, and even for a Killer they’re freakishly strong.

But they’re still unfinished.

“Out of the way, newblood!” I slash forward, driving the full weight of my unnatural biology at them and sending them barreling backward in a stumble.

My turn.

I duck low and swing wide, and my claws rip through the cheap denim and find soft flesh beneath. Fogforged metal splits skin, muscle, and sinew, opening them up and releasing a swelter of gore onto the filth-caked ground.

Zephyr screams something but I’m too deep in my own bloodlust to catch any of it.

That turns out to be to my detriment when, a moment later, another one of the little bastards jumps me from behind, screaming like a banshee as they plunge a blade into my back over and over. The sound that leaves me is less a roar and more of a bellow as I flail back and forth. The fledgling Killer clings to me with preternatural strength and agility so, lacking any other option, I straighten out, lunge backward, slam my attacker into the brick wall of the alley to pin them in place, and plunge all ten of my silver fingerblades behind my head and deep into either side of their skull.

Its shriek is unearthly, and I can't help but wonder who I just hurt.

Sweetie? Scootaloo? Is it them?

The figure slumps bonelessly off of me just as the first one regains its bearing. The wound that would have been instantly lethal to any normal being has already stopped bleeding and sealed over as they lunge at me in a feral frenzy, knife raised high to drive it into my heart.

All these things have is rage; no training, no skill, just blind rage, and if I had been any other Killer that might be enough.

My grip on reality has always been a little… loosey-goosey… ever since my conversion into a Killer, though, and I loosen that grip with a mental flex of will.

Space and conscious thought fold around me, and to their eyes, I will have simply ceased to exist for a split second. Only that brief quarter-beat of time, though, but it’s enough.

More than enough actually.

One of the downsides to having all of your senses cranked to eleven is that if you lose your target it’s like suddenly going blind.

Their blade swings through the space I occupied a moment ago and the greenhorn Killer howls as all of its weight and power hammers through empty air and they bury their knife three inches straight into the concrete ground.

Then I'm back, looming over my little half-born sibling. Two swings, back and forth, and I flay open their back.

I can kill them now. Massive trauma is the only way to destroy a Killer, even temporarily, and I would do it in an instant if I thought it would be a mercy. I still don’t know for certain if my elder siblings ever remanifested after they were taken apart during the Exodus. I suspect they did, but these ones, if it is them then I don’t know how much of them is still human and how much is Killer.

How much of them is Fog.

If I kill them now, it might mean a permanent death. No returning to the arms of the Thief to be reborn, and no more murders on the streets of Canterlot. That would be a mercy.

So I show mercy.

I swing for the neck, and I would have gotten them too if I weren’t so lost in my own head that I somehow forgot that they travel in threes.

From somewhere above me, maybe even the roof of the building, another, slighter figure drops down with a feral, tinny shriek. I whip around at the noise, trying to move out of the way, but it’s far too late.

The fledgling slams me to the ground. This one's weapon isn't a knife, but a metal school ruler that's been sharpened to a point and had long, heavy needles bonded to it, and they plunge the makeshift blade into me repeatedly, ripping and tearing and leaving deep, ragged wounds. I try to take a swing at them but the one in the denim jacket lunges and lands hard on my right arm. The one I brained is already up as well and pins my left, nailing it to the ground with a keyhole saw.

I try to flicker, but I have nowhere to go. It’s not like teleportation, I just briefly phase myself, and without a place to move to I remain stuck underneath them. The best I can do is jostle their grip, but that won’t be enough.

The one straddling me cackles in mad glee as they raise their crude weapon high over my face.

What an incredibly stupid way to die.

I don’t properly see what happens next. One moment, the frothing psychopath is straddling me, ready to empty the contents of my skull onto the pavement, and the next she’s just gone with a noise like a bag of quarters impacting a brick wall.

Blood showers me and paints the alleyway, and I blink in confusion, as shocked by the sudden turn of events as the two murder-happy idiots that are pinning my arms.

All three of us stare down the alley as the body of the Killer who had jumped me from above lands with a boneless, meaty thud better than five meters away to lie gruesomely twitching with all of their limbs pointed in the wrong directions.

Then, as one, we turn to look up.

Its breath is a heavy, ursine sound coming from deep within its barrel chest as it stands from its hunched posture to tower better than two and a half meters tall. The armour it’s wearing looks like something out of mythology, bronze or brass, I think, and what skin isn’t being covered by the ancient style of armour is the colour of a fresh and terrible bruise. Its face is covered by a mask that looks like the deformed skull of some kind of demon, and it’s painted in a riot of blacks and reds, and from the top and back of the skullplate is a horse-like mane of fiery red hair that looks to be literally burning with rage.

And in that moment, I recall just how close to the East End we are.

The Ogre of the East… guess I was wrong about my pissed-off-cop theory.

Without warning, the thing arches its back and bellows in primordial rage. The noise rattles in my skull and shakes my ribcage, and although I can see Zephyr screaming from the hook I can’t hear it over the cacophony of hate the Ogre is pouring out.

The little freak with the hunting knife lets out a snarl as it leaps from my arm at the giant avatar of violence standing over it, raising a knife that looks hilariously pitiful compared to the Ogre.

The denim-clad murderer doesn’t even make it all the way to the Ogre. With a twitch of one massive arm, the thing swings what looks like the better part of a tree with pieces of sharp black stone sticking out at the midair Killer.

Another wet thwack, and they’re sent flying like a sock full of loose, damp rice.

The third one still has some semblance of survival instinct and yanks their saw from my arm before turning to run, putting their back to the Ogre and sprinting away. For a moment I think their unnatural speed might get them out, except… then the Ogre hunches forward, grinds its feet into the ground, and then runs.

It covers the whole of the alley in the space of a breath. Nothing that big has any right to move that fast! The Ogre overtakes the smaller Killer in a moment, takes one massive overhead swing and—

BANG!

A thunderous gunshot report splits the air and something bolts over and past me, down the alley, to bury itself deep in the meat of the Ogre’s back.

Some kind of harpoon-and-spike arrangement attached to a chain goes taut as I turn onto my side coughing and hacking as blood wells up from cuts that refuse to heal to follow the chain to its source. I need to see them, to know what I’m fighting, because if I’m right then this can only be one thing.

The Legions’ handler.

My pain-blurred vision betrays me here and there but I get the broad strokes well enough. They’re tall and lupine, and dressed in an old style of duster that’s worn and grey with a heavy mantle over an old three-piece suit. On their head is a broad, notched hat that’s tipped low to cover their face, but I can see one eye, white and gleaming like a soulless headlight, peering through one of the notches of the hat to eyeball the Ogre.

And in their hands is their weapon: what’s clearly a custom-built longarm modified with a winch and chain that’s attached to a cruel bolt of barbed steel, and with a curved and wicked underslung bayonet to cap it off.

Setting their feet firmly on the ground, the new Killer, the handler, takes a grip on the winch and starts to crank the feed of the chain back in and, impossibly, the Ogre starts to move.

It thrashes and howls, swinging wildly behind itself to try and get to the chain, but it’s too big. Its muscles actually get in their way. Not only that, its top-heavy body is canted by the pressure of the gunslinger's chain pulling it back so the Ogre can’t get its feet under it to get any kind of leverage.

Redheart was right. This Killer actually knows what they’re doing.

The gunslinger drags the Ogre back and away from the lesser Killers who hobble to their feet.

“GIT!” The one in the denim jacket rasps wetly as they stagger to their feet, gesturing sharply with an arm that isn’t quite healed.

They sprint for the far end of the alley, pausing only to kneel down and scoop up the still-dazed body of their third and smallest companion before scrambling out of the alley and back into the Fog to heal.

Damn it.

At the far other end of the alley, the gunslinger gives one final, mighty heave on their chain before lunging forward and burying the blade of their bayonet in the Ogre’s spine. With a snarl of hate, the gunslinger gives a massive lurch and upends the Ogre over their head, past them and down to the ground to slam face-first into the concrete.

For a moment, while the Ogre is stunned, the gunslinger pauses and turns its covered face to me. I can feel its headlamp eye on me, shining as it stares me down. In that same span of time, its hands flip through the calm motions of reloading, ratcheting back the bolt to eject the spent cartridge before sliding a new one home.

The gunslinger turns its back on me and moves past the Ogre who’s already getting to its feet, roars, and turns to follow its attacker in a mad rage. I doubt that thing will catch the ‘Slinger though. That Killer seems far too canny to be caught by a rage-fueled monster like the Ogre.

La-la la-la la-la-la~

I start to laugh in a brittle crackle as Adagio’s lullaby approaches. At least no one is going to be able to finish me off with her here, so instead of moving I just relax back onto the ground, breathing hard, and bleeding harder while I try to focus on staying alive.

Something is seriously wrong… I’m not healing. It’s not that I expected to heal as fast as I did in the Trials where I was surrounded by Fog and magic, but no… I’m not healing at all anymore.

“Shit!” Starlight swears as she comes around the corner with Aria, Sour Sweet, and Adagio hot on her heels stopping only for a second to look over me before running to my side and dropping to her knees. “Oh, c’mon, Shimmer, what the hell did you do?”

“H-Had to,” I cough and sputter black blood from between chapped lips. “ Can’t let them… complete… a s-sacrifice… too dangerous.”

I’ve definitely got a collapsed lung. It’s only my impossible biology that’s keeping me going this long.

“How the fuck are you...?” Starlight looks pale as Sour Sweet carefully gets under Zephyr to lift him and get him down off of the hook. “How are you like this?!”

“Move!” Aria snaps as she drops beside Starlight and starts looking me over. “Damn it, Red, you’re losing a lot of blood here… assuming this is blood.”

“I h-had to m-manifest physically,” I reply with a weak chuckle. “Didn’t think I’d… be useless… though.”

It’s infuriating. Understandable, but infuriating. A Killer can’t help a Survivor, it’s not how we’re wired, so I have no idea why I thought I would be any use to that poor bastard on the hook.

Moreover, that means we need to keep Tempest, Sour, Aria, and Starlight on the front lines with Adagio and I. If someone is hooked then we need to have at least one of them there to free the victim.

“Why isn't she healing?” Sour asks as she turns away from Zephyr towards Aria, jarring me from my thoughts.

I was drifting, I realise, and my limbs have gone leaden.

“The Fog,” Adagio says quietly from behind Starlight and her sister. “It’s the Fog that heals us.”

I frown but nod.

“How much of your Fog is being used to keep you physical?” Adagio asks.

Oh. Right.

For a genius, I can be a real dumbass sometimes. Of course I’m not healing! My body produces Fog, but this isn’t my body it’s a facsimile made from ambient power I’m projecting into! It’s a shell that can feel pain! It has my Killer body’s biology and powers but it has to rely on surrounding Fog to stay solid, and here, outside the Trials, there just isn’t enough of it.

“I’m going b-back to my body,” I say. “Take c-care of him, okay?”

I nod over to Zephyr, and my friends each nod back. Adagio crouches near me and shifts her mask to the side, and as she does so the lullaby on her lips dies out.

“I’ll keep an eye on our family,” Adagio says quietly, brushing a hand over my head before looking up at Aria, “and you should head back to the apartment, just in case.”

Aria nods and steps back as I let out a laboured, rattling breath, and allow my form to fall away into Fog once more.

My vision fades to black as I fall backward into the Dreamtime, caught on the tides of the endless ocean that makes up the collective unconscious of the universe, and allow it to carry me back to my body.

Weight is always the first sensation. The astral weightlessness of my wandering dreamform is one of total freedom, anchored by nothing physical. The next, oddly, is always my sense of taste. I taste… blood?

I gasp out a raw rattling croak as pain floods my senses. The stink of copper is filling my nose, and I can barely breathe. I’m lying in something hot and wet, and as I force my eyes open I look down, and swallow hard.

My body is a ruin.

Holes are punched through my torso, and probably my back too, given the amount of blood soaking the mattress. Sympathetic wounds reflected onto my body from the projection I'd forced into the real world!

“Sh-Shit!” I reach for my phone on the end table. Pick it up, and speed-dial Redheart.

I can’t have nine-one-one coming in on me like this. They’ll have questions. They’ll want to know why I’m not dead. Redheart buried most of my medical records from the night I was brought in. The ones that showed my unnatural biology. Once I was conscious I took care of the memories of the EMT crew that brought me in, as well as the few members of the hospital staff that might’ve seen me.

//Shimmer? What’s—//

“I need help!” I gasp, and I hear Redheart take in a sharp breath at my tone. “I’m h-hurt… I don’t know if I can h-heal through it!”

//Isn’t Aria there? She was going to you! Where are you?!//

“At h-home… the apartment,” I gasp out. “The inhaler… is it ready?”

//It’s… shit! I don’t know! Maybe?//

“Bring it!” I snarl. “I don’t know if I’m gonna heal through this one!”

The line goes dead as my phone tumbles from numb fingers. By rights I should already be dead. Only my nature as a Killer is keeping me alive right now. I’ve lost more blood than any normal human could hope to lose without suffering permanent brain damage.

Extreme trauma. It’s the only thing that kills a Killer, and I’m right on the edge of it. I can feel my life ebbing and flowing. The genetic sorcery of the Entity’s priesthood is keeping me alive, but only barely, and I have no idea if it will win out against the wounds those little bastards inflicted on me.

“Breathe,” I say to myself. “Just… keep breathing.”

Inhale, exhale.

In and out.

I try to focus through the pain and wracking spasms of coughing. Everything hurts, and I’ve definitely fucked up at least one of my lungs.

For the first time since Aria and Redheart told me the truth, I actually feel grateful for the Fog suffusing my body. I have no idea if my breathing is doing anything beyond the normal, but I figure if I produce Fog, if I exhale it with every breath, then maybe it will give my body a little more to work with.

I have no idea how much time passes, but it can’t be all that much before the sound of a door crashing open reaches my ears. I can barely focus my eyes, all I can think to do is to keep breathing.

“Sunset?!” Redheart calls my name from the living room, but I can’t respond. I don’t have enough energy.

Her rapid footfalls bring her closer, and then the door to mine and Tempest’s room bursts open, and Redheart stumbles in, takes one look at me, and goes white as a sheet.

“Oh God.” She lifts a hand to her mouth and I think I hear her mutter a prayer.

Funny. I didn’t know Redheart was religious. I wonder if she’s always been that way. All that time spent in the ED and the old adage of atheists and foxholes seems relevant. I can’t say I’m the same, however often I swear by Written’s Quill, and unlike most of my race, my native race that is, I know that Celestia isn’t truly a Goddess. She’s close, very close… but she’s not one.

No. I’ve met a real god, and I can’t say I recommend it.

“Hold still, don’t move,” Redheart drops something that looks like a heavy kitbag beside the bed and kneels. “I’m going to have to cut your clothes off, okay? Hold very still.”

I watch as she takes out a pair of heavy shears and begins slicing straight up from my blood-soaked sleep shirt, through the clasp of my bra, and up to my neck. Once it’s free she peels away the fabric she visibly winces at whatever she sees when she examines my bare torso.

“What the hell?” Redheart breathes the words out as she gets to work mopping up the blood, probably trying to find the wounds themselves. “What did this to you?”

“My own… b-bad choices,” I sputtered, “per usual.”

“Shit, this is bad,” Redheart mutters. “Your blood is trying to clot but these wounds are too deep, every time you breathe it just tears the wounds open again.”

“Sounds about right,” I cough. “Probably like the other victims, huh?”

Redheart doesn’t answer but the lines around her face grow deeper as her expression tightens. Out of the kitbag comes a large white case with a red cross on it, and she begins pulling out large pads of clean white linen that she sprays with something, probably a disinfectant.

“I have no clue how to deal with this,” Redheart says while she works. “Anyone else would be dead… but I’ll try.”

“No rush,” I say with a laugh. “I’m bleeding out both sides though, just so you know.”

“And if we’re lucky the mattress has clogged up most of those,” Redheart snaps. “Now we just have to keep you from leaking whatever blood you still have left in you out this direction.”

She sprays down my whole body with a thickly scented antibacterial before laying out thick pads of linen, each one three or four individual pads deep, across sections of my torso. The swathes of cloth get pinned down with surgical tape. More and more go over me, each one soaking through almost immediately with my black, inhuman blood.

“Okay,” Redheart says. “I think I’ve got most of it,” she yanks off a pair of plastic gloves, wipes down her hands, and dons a new set. “I can’t even try and look at your back without risking everything though.”

“Don’t sweat it,” I say weakly. I’m starting to get really light-headed, which is probably bad, but my breathing is coming a little easier. “I think my healing factor patched up my lung, but it’s probably struggling with the deep tissue damage.”

“Well, bully for your lung,” Redheart replies acidly. “You’re going to need it up and running if we want this to have its best chance at working.”

She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a little white cylinder.

“This is a soft mist inhaler,” she says, holding it up in front of my face. “I’m going to put the nozzle into your mouth and when I say go, I need you to breathe in as long and as deeply as you can, do you understand me?”

I nod. Words are getting hard to form but I get it.

“Good girl.” Redheart pops open one side of the device, slots in a small tube, then closes it. “First take three, quick, sharp breaths in a row, then let it all out. Do it!”

I nod again, and inhale sharply three times, before breathing out shakily.

Then she fits the nozzle between my lips, braces her thumb over the trigger, and with her other hand cradles my head so my throat doesn’t close up.

“Breathe!” She shouts as she depresses the trigger.

The flavor is strange on my tongue as I take in a long, deep breath. It’s nostalgic, like those soft lumps of sweet fried dough I would get from Donut Joe’s as a filly with Princess Celestia. The sense-memory is comforting and familiar as the concentrated burst of Fog floods down into my lungs and spreads through my body like tendrils of cool air.

Instantly I can feel the difference. My breathing evens out, the pain recedes, and my focus starts to fill back in. My vision, which had been starting to gray out, snaps back into sharp coloured contrast.

“Oh… Shit…” Redheart stands slowly up from me and starts backing away.

I don’t know why she looks so frightened. I feel great. I start to sit up, my skin is itching a little, almost like there are thousands of insects marching across it, but it’s not an unpleasant feeling by any means. I take a deep breath, in and out, and the Fog fills my mouth like nectar.

A flick of my finger peels the linens from my skin. I don’t need them anymore, the holes are already closing. My fingers twitch with spastic reflex, metal rasps on metal as I stand up from the bed. Redheart is backing away still, but I don’t know why.

Everything is fine. It’s all going to be fine.

“One, two, Sunny’s coming for you~” I chant. I can’t help but laugh. It’s funny. It really is! Everything is so funny!

And so, so, red.

“Sunset, please, you have to listen to me!” Redheart sounds frightened, so I smile for her.

It doesn’t seem to help. Maybe it’s because she’s a mess. She’s covered in beautiful black blood, and while I certainly have no problem with it I know Redheart is the tidy type. I flicker forward, crossing the span of the room with a step, and Redheart lets out a startled yelp as she stumbles back and pins herself to the wall.

I follow her, closing the distance until we’re practically nose to nose. I can see what Aria sees in her. She’s pretty, with her bright eyes, pink hair, and pale-cream skin. I draw a single silver fingerblade down her face, tracing the pattern of a tear, and she grits her teeth as I break the skin just slightly.

Just enough to well up a single ruby teardrop.

“Hello~ Nurse.” I grin, lean in, and run my tongue along her cheek.

She sobs and shivers as a sugary copper tang rolls over my palate. It’s thick and strong. It’s rich with hope. Hope and despair.

“You know…” I murr against her cheek. “I do like a lady in uniform~.” Redheart lets out a quiet sob of terror that sends a thrill up my spine. “And I’m sure you know I’ve always had a little bit of a… thing… for Aria. If you ever feel like joining Tempest and I? I’m sure she wouldn’t mi~nd.”

“Sunset, please, this isn’t—!” Redheart starts, but I put a single bladed finger to her lips, and her words cut off.

“Sshh… it’s okay,” I coo. “I know how you look at me, even when you’re with Aria… it’s flattering really,” I chuckle as I lick my lips. “You can’t help it though, can you?”

I grip her chin and force her to look me in the eyes, something she had pointedly avoided doing until now.

“I’m right in your ‘strike zone’ as it were, aren’t I?” I bare my teeth in an ecstatic grin. “Young, pretty, and talented… just like the last one.”

“This isn’t you!” Redheart sobs. “This isn’t really you!”

“Does Aria know?” I ask, feeling laughter welling up in my chest. It’s a spectacular bit of fun, really. “About how your last fling wasn’t even out of her residency? Nineteen years old when you met, a student… wow, you sure do like’m yo—”

“SUNSET!”

Aria’s voice shocks through me, and I stagger back from Redheart before turning to look over my shoulder. Aria is standing at the door to the bedroom, and her hand is raised and gripping a familiar weapon. Shame spreads like poison through my stomach, and the feeling is punctuated by the hammer of Tempest’s old Colt forty-five that she keeps in the desk drawer being cocked back.

“Back away from her, Red,” Aria says. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

A raw and ragged smile stretches across my face like an open wound as I turn my head to face her.

“You can’t hurt me anyway, Ari’,” I hiss. “Not with that thing… not with anything!”

I’m in front of Aria before she can react. I tear the gun from her hand and pitch it onto the bloodstained bed.

“NO ONE CAN EVER HURT ME AGAIN!”

I ram my claws two knuckles deep into the wooden doorframe by Aria’s head, but she doesn’t flinch. Aria never flinches, though. She’s absolutely fearless, and unlike Redheart I don’t have to make her look at me.

“I won’t hurt you like they did, Red,” she says. “No matter what you do to me, I will never hurt one of my sisters that way.”

She closes the distance and wraps her arms around me, and I freeze. Disgust fills me and closes my throat. My hate, my anger, and my confidence wash away in a sluice of bile and ugly guilt.

I’m hideous. She’s touching me but I’m hideous. I’m a monster! I—!

Aria’s hand settles on the back of my head and she pulls me down. It’s insistent but gentle. Just a soft request for me to come closer, and almost against my own will, I oblige and bury my face against her shoulder.

“Sshh, it’s okay,” Aria whispers softly. “Come back to me, Red… you’re safe, I promise… you’re safe here.”

Her fingers card through my matted hair making gentle petting motions. Aria really is completely unafraid. Even though I’m one of them. A Killer. A Priest of the Old Stain, she’s holding me like a child. Even though I’m literally the stuff of my friends—my real friends—actual nightmares, she’s still here.

She’s still on my side.

Tears run down my cheeks, and I sob against Aria’s shoulder as grief suddenly overwhelms me. My whole body is rigid, like someone ran a livewire through my skin and locked up every muscle. I want to curl up in a ball and cry, and I want to run, and I want to kill everyone in this room and just forget about who I am.

It’s such a tempting prospect. To just… accept it. To accept my nature.

And give up everything else.

“It’s alright,” Aria says. “You’re alright, Red… you’re safe.”

I grip her tightly, taking care not to cut her, and I let her draw me out of the Fog. I follow the voice and scent of my sister out of the shadows and into the light, even though the light burns my eyes, it’s where she is. It’s where Tempest and Sour and Starlight and Redheart are.

Aria leads me out of the Fog, and I want to tell her to just let go. To leave me there. It’s not her responsibility to keep pulling me out of the darkness. It’s not on her to drag my worthless, ungrateful ass out of the Fog and back into the daylight.

But she does it anyway.

“Come back to me.” Aria presses her lips to my crown and runs her hands over my hair. “Come back to your family.”

I sink to my knees, sobbing, and Aria follows me down. The Killer in me drifts back into the Fog leaving me behind, weak and spent, in my sisters arms.

The worst part is, I know I’ll go back. I’ll go back into the Fog to find that power over and over again, and the people I love will have to keep dragging me out, kicking and screaming, only to watch me crawl back in again.

But right now, she’s real and warm beneath me, and she’s cradling me in her lap, and muttering soft words in her native tongue as she rocks me back and forth while I sob my way through my self-hatred.

“There you are, Red” Aria says after a few moments, pulling away to look down at me, smiling.

“I’m sorry,” I sob quietly.

“I know.”

She rubs my back and rocks me back and forth, and in the back of the apartment I can hear Redheart still hyperventilating. I’m not sure what it means that Aria stays with me, but as guilty as it makes me feel, it’s… it’s nice to be chosen.

This is what family is, I guess.

Real family always sides with family.

And Aria? She’s my family.

Author's Note

Dispatch this thug in brutal fashion!

Part of my Marathon Fundraiser to help with my move! If you can support it please visit my Patreon!

1.8

I stay out of the bedroom while Adagio, Sour, and Starlight clean it up. It was awkward, having them come in and see me sobbing in Aria’s arms while covered in blood, but I guess they’ve seen me worse off. Either way, I don’t really have the wherewithal to go back in there for now so, instead, I sit at the small kitchen table and nurse a cup of coffee with Aria sitting beside me, silent and comforting.

While we wait, I tell them what I remember of the Ogre. How it looked like a demon, or like an Oni out of old Neighponese mythology, only a little different. The colors were slightly wrong and the armor was a different style. I was too out of it to get a good look though. I’d already lost most of my blood by that point.

Problems on problems on problems. It all compounds but in the end, there’s nothing we can do about it. The Ogre. The Deathslinger, the Legion who's running around shanking people. If the Narc is a Fogborn Killer too then we’re really fucked.

And all the while, Redheart takes my vitals.

Every time Redheart goes to touch me there's a faint hesitation now, though. There’s a fear of me in her that wasn’t there a few hours ago. Then again, she’d never truly witnessed a Killer at full chat.

Not really.

She saw me a year ago in a near-coma. She’s seen Adagio and I both in our half-states, controlled and sane.

But a real Killer? One who remembers what the purpose of its existence is, and who remembers the being that it calls god and father?

Oh no.

Until tonight, Redheart never knew the sheer, unbridled terror of tangling with a true, Fogborn Killer.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and Redheart flinches.

She’s staring down at her watch while she waits out the manual blood pressure cuff’s deflation time. Her thumb and forefinger are resting on my wrist, timing my pulse, and to her credit, there’s no movement in either of them. She’s too good of a doctor for that.

“It wasn’t you,” Redheart says after a moment.

I chuckle bitterly at that. “It was a lot of me, you can’t just say the bad parts aren’t me, that’s not really fair.”

“Who you are as a Killer—”

“It was still me, so I’m apologising,” I say firmly. “If you’re not going to accept that then…”

I take a long, slow breath, turn to Aria, and try to find some strength in her. She smirks at me, although it’s a tired thing, and takes my hand to give it a solid squeeze.

“The things I said—” I begin as I turn back to Redheart— “Dreams are my weapon… I slip into your mind, scrape through memories of fear, shame, and guilt, the things that make up your nightmares… so I’m sorry I said what I said.”

Redheart draws her hand back and turns to jot down the numbers, looks over them, then grimaces. They probably don’t look like anything a human body would produce, but she has my baseline numbers to compare them to.

“You were right, though,” Redheart says after a moment. “About me, I mean, and how I’m not a good person, and—” she looks pointedly over at Aria— “I consider myself deeply fortunate to have found someone who can stomach me.”

“Shut up ‘Hearts you know I love you.” Aria says.

“The only thing I doubt is whether or not you should,” Redheart replies tersely. “Sunset wasn’t wrong, I—”

“I was wrong,” I say firmly. “You have to understand that about me when I’m like that… I’m not telling you the truth, I’m just trying to hurt you.”

“The truth hurts,” Redheart says.

I sigh and lean back in my chair, take another drink of coffee, and let out another slow breath.

“Yes, I know,” I say. “But that doesn’t mean that everything that hurts is the truth.”

Redheart shakes her head as she pulls the cuff off of my arm and tucks it away before pulling out her stethoscope and settling it over my heart.

“And I also happen to know that you always regretted that relationship,” I continue.

Redheart closes her eyes for a long moment, then sighs and opens them again. “Deep breaths, please.”

I oblige her, taking several deep breaths as she moves the stethoscope around my chest before having me hike my shirt and turn slightly so she can do the same along my back.

“No obstructions,” she declares as she draws back. “Your lungs are as good as new, maybe better.”

“Thank you,” I say quietly.

“And you’re right,” Redheart continues, perking me up. “I did always regret my relationship with Stargazer… I got caught up and I think I hurt her. She wanted more from me than a woman my age had to give.”

“She wanted different things, ‘Hearts.” Aria says, finally moving her hand from mine and sliding closer to the Director. “She wanted something you didn’t have. But me? I like what you got, ‘Hearts… you’re what I want, okay?”

Redheart sniffles softly, then leans on Aria, burying her face against the middle Siren sister’s shoulder.

Aria has always been against telling Redheart the truth about her past. As far as Redheart knows, Aria and her sisters are just more victims of the Entity, no different from Sour Sweet or Starlight. Even now, after being together for almost a year, Redheart has no idea that the woman she’s been sleeping with is ancient beyond compare.

And Aria made me swear to keep it that way.

‘I’m human now, Red, so why does it even matter?’

I didn’t have a good rebuttal for that, and I still don't. If Aria doesn’t want to bring up the person she used to be, the being she used to be, then I would accept that. My own opinion is still that Redheart would accept her, but I’m not even sure that’s the reason Aria keeps her nature a secret.

“My relationship with Stargazer was a lapse and a mistake, and it never should have happened,” Redheart says quietly after a moment. “I was older, more experienced, and I should have been more responsible, but I wasn’t.”

“We all have things we’re ashamed of, my dear doctor.” Adagio’s cultured tones cut through the grim atmosphere as she steps out of the bedroom.

Her delicate hands are gripping a towel stained black with my blood.

If you didn’t know her, you’d expect her to balk at the concept of cleaning up that kind of mess. Adagio Dazzle doesn’t look like the sort of girl who would be able to stomach getting her hands dirty, and that probably works to her favor more often than not.

I happen to know from experience that Adagio is more than willing to dirty her hands as much as necessary to get the job done. There’s a reason I trust her above anyone else, even Aria, when it comes down to the wire.

Aria is my best friend, but Adagio?

Adagio is my strong right arm.

“Trust me when I say that if the worst you have to regret is a dalliance with someone a decade your junior, then count yourself lucky,” Adagio says with a wry grin. “Some of us have regrets that run far, far deeper.”

Redheart eyes Adagio for a long moment, and I can’t tell if the good doctor is insulted or not. Adagio, by appearances, can’t be much more than a year or so older than Aria. That would still leave Adagio as being several years younger than Redheart.

“Friends among sinners,” I say quietly. “You won’t find us judging you, Director… no one here has clean hands.”

“I’m not sure if that’s comforting or not,” Redheart replies.

“On another topic,” I start, leaning back in my chair to look towards the room. “Hey! Sour? How’s Zephyr?”

“The whiner?” Sour asks, poking her head out from behind Adagio. “Oh he was nice enough, once he stopped bitching which was never.”

“He was bleeding pretty badly, but Adagio patched up the worst of it,” Starlight says as she follows her girlfriend out. “We passed him off to his parents. They were freaking out, which is understandable, and I’m positive he went to the hospital, but I think he should be okay… the wound was bad, though.”

That was likely an understatement. Redheart’s discovery regarding the Fog and our bodies means that Survivors are very nearly a different subspecies thanks to the Entity’s interference. Zephyr doesn’t have our healing factor, so his wound was orders of magnitude more dangerous to him than a hook wound would be to one of us.

“He’s lucky,” I say, then I grimace. “But we’re not.”

That gets a round of looks.

“Think about it,” I continue. “Zephyr was hooked, not dead right?” I can see the realisation dawning on Aria and Adagio, and Starlight and Sour are quick on the uptake.

“The others were murdered!” Sour says grimly. “But the kid was downed and hooked like a normal Survivor of a Trial, which means the Thief has gotten control of their Killers.”

“And if we’re not careful, the Thief will be able to start acquiring more power through the Trial ritual,” Adagio finishes the thought with a dour expression. “I see what you mean.”

“Shit.” Aria crosses her arms and scowls.

“How are we supposed to stop them?” Starlight asks as she steps into the living room with Sour Sweet on her heels. “Canterlot is huge! They could just pluck someone off the streets and we’d never know unless we were watching twenty-four-seven!”

“So all we have to do is watch a city full of millions of people at all times?” Sour asks brightly, then scowls. “Yeah, I don’t think that’s doable.”

“Agreed,” Adagio says. “We need to find the source, then. We can’t let this continue.”

“But we have no leads!” Aria snaps.

“Not quite true,” Adagio says, drawing a look from all of us.

“Talk to me, ‘Dagi,” I say, turning back to her. “What’ve you got?”

“Not much,” she admits with a shrug. “Only that when I chased them off, I smelled the scent of snow and woodsmoke beneath the ash and blood that hangs around any other Killer.”

“Is there any chance you could identify their human forms for certain?” I ask, feeling a rush of hope. I don't tell them my suspicions. I can't do that to them. Not til it's more than just a guess.

The hope that someone else might say what I don't want to is quashed as Adagio shakes her head.

“No,” Adagio says grimly. “I don’t think Killers carry the same scent once they change, even you don’t smell like yourself when you’ve shifted.” That was news to me, but I trusted Adagio’s assessment. “I suspect it’s the smell of their home, whatever location would count as their ‘Trial Grounds’ if they were fully realised Killers.”

“So Killers carry their scent, and the smell of their home turf,” Aria says pensively. “Snow…”

“It’s winter in Canterlot,” Starlight says. “That could be anywhere.”

“I don’t think that’s right,” Redheart breaks in, leaning forward for a moment before standing and starting to pace. “From what you’ve all told me, each Killer has their home field, and it never changes in the fundamentals, right?”

I nod at that. The distorted marbles of reality that make up a Killer’s Trials occasionally had things in different places now and again, but the main set up of them was always the same. Adagio’s Trial, ‘Mother’s Cabin’ as we called it, always had Adagio’s cabin in the dead center of the map and there was always a circle of menhir somewhere near it, but sometimes the standing stones would be on different sides of the cabin than they were last time.

My running theory is that each time a new Trial is begun, and the Entity goes about plopping down generators and hooks, he has to tear up the marble a little bit before putting it back together, and when he puts it back together he draws it out of the Killer’s memories. That was why the main structures are almost always in the same places, but the other objects, things like trees and ruined walls, always seem a little more randomly spaced and are never the same trial to trial.

The fact is, the Killer just doesn’t remember exactly where the trees were. They only remember the general layout, and the Entity takes that and rolls with it.

“What about it?” I ask as Redheart paces a few more times, tapping her lips with one finger before looking up at me.

“What if the smell is a permanent state?” Redheart asks. “Canterlot smells like snow now, sure, but if you were to ask someone to describe Canterlot by smell they would probably pick something different.”

Aria sits up sharply at that. “Shit, so the smell of snow and woodsmoke… that’s the core of the place? So what smells like those things all the time?”

“No clue, but it’s a lead,” I say, firmly, but my expression sours to a grimace. “I might have another one, too… but I’m not sure. I want to look into it a little before we commit.”

“Wanna share with the rest of the class, Red?” Aria says flatly.

“No,” I reply, drawing looks from the rest of my friends. “Look just… I need to look into this one alone first okay?”

“This isn’t a game, Red,” Aria says, her eyes narrowing on me. “You went out alone before and—”

“I went off before because it was a one-in-a-million chance I even saw them!” I snarl.

Silence crashes down onto the room. Everyone is staring at me, and Redheart lets out a quiet, strangled squeak as she retreats into Aria’s arms.

The room is tinged red.

“Mi Sol.”

I go rigid, and the tension in the room turns frosty as we all look up. Tempest is standing in the doorway to our bedroom. She looks worn-out, a little pale, and she’s breathing like she just ran a marathon to get here.

“That’s enough of that,” she continues, nodding down at me.

I follow her gaze down my hands, wince, and force my fists to unclench, before standing slowly, drawing my hands back as I step away from the table. I don’t want them to see how my fingers have started to turn silver.

I’m sure my eyes have already given me away though.

“Where were you?” I ask quietly.

“Lo siento mucho, Mi Sol,” Tempest says softly. “I don’t have a good excuse, I was out and I didn’t get the message until it was too late.”

“C’mon ladies, let’s give them some room,” Aria says, standing up and shepherding the rest of our little family past Tempest and out into the den.

I listen to them slowly dispersing into the night, and sit quietly at the desk of Tempest and my shared room as the small apartment empties out until it’s just the two of us, alone.

Even though I know it’s not fair, and that it was just bad timing, I still feel betrayed. Tempest should have been there for me, is what my brain is telling me. If she loved me she would have been there. That’s no never mind to the fact that I’d run off on my own, given no one any warning, and then called Tempest from an unknown number. Even if I’d been able to get a hold of her there wouldn’t have been any guarantee that she would have been nearby.

We were supposed to keep the group apprised of when we went out ‘hunting’ so there could be people on standby in case things got hairy, and I hadn’t done that. It was my fault and yet…

I was still upset.

“Talk to me?” Tempest asks as she moves beside me and kneels, taking my hand in hers and clasping it warmly, even though I know my fingers are still cold, unnatural metal.

“I’m doing this alone,” I say quietly. “And I’m not asking for permission.”

“Mi Sol…”

“I won’t pick any fights alone,” I say, pulling my hand back. “I promise.”

Tempest bows her head but I can feel as much as see the scowl forming on her face. Her temper is flaring as she shakes her head and stands up, crossing her arms over her broad chest.

“That’s not fair, Mi Sol,” Tempest says tightly. “We’re supposed to be in this together!”

“THEN WHERE WERE YOU?!”

My accusation rattles the windows and Tempest pales. I probably would have hurt her less if I’d just flipped out my claws and gutted her.

“Mi Sol…”

I pull my hand back, and away from Tempest. I’m so angry that my throat is closing up. Tears are biting at the edges of my vision, and all I want to do is scream and rage at her, and that stupid because it’s completely unfair.

“I’m sorry,” I mumble the words out as I step back.

“Don’t be,” she replies. “You’re right… you needed me, and I wasn’t there.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I still wasn’t there.”

I lower my head and wrap my arms around myself. I hate this. I hate feeling all of this. Everything was so much easier when I was just one of the Old Stain's Killers. A part of me wants to go back to that even though I know it would mean washing away everything that makes me ‘me’ in a tide of blood. That same part asks the most damning question of all too, which is: would that really be such a bad thing?

At least I wouldn’t care anymore.

“I’m… I’m going back out,” I say quietly.

“That’s not happening,” Tempest says, making a slicing motion with her hand. “Not after tonight.””

“It’s not up for debate, Temp,” I say as I shove past her.

I move past Tempest and into the hall toward the living room to grab my jacket. Tempest closes our door and follows me out, and I can feel her scowl weighing down on the back of my neck.

“No!” Tempest snaps. “I said you’re staying in tonight and I’m finished with your evasive shit, Mi Sol!”

“Then why even stay with me at all?!” I snarl, whirling on her even as I continue backing away. “If you’re done with my shit then stop talking and FUCK OFF!”

Tempest lets out an inchoate bellow of rage, snatches up an empty glass from the table, and pitches it across the room where it explodes against the wall in a shower of shards as she spits a stream of Marexican invectives.

“That’s right! Yell and break things! Like always!” I snarl. “That’s incredibly helpful! Thank you!”

“Fuck you!” Tempest jabs a finger at me. “You always do this! You never let anyone in! No matter how hard I try! No matter what we do, you keep us out!”

“I have my reasons!” I slap her hand away.

Tempest’s face contorts with rage.

“What reasons?!” Tempest spits. “You mean wandering through Canterlot as the Nightmare instead of sleeping! Or did you think I didn’t know?!”

“I can do whatever the fuck I want!” I figured she knew, I never lied about it but I never talked about it either. I also wasn’t very subtle. “And I patrol! I have to! That’s the only reason we saved that doofus in the alley tonight!”

Tempest screams again, then lashes out with a heavy, booted foot at the couch. The whole couch heaves back with a deafening WHAM before she turns back to me.

“Don’t you fucking lie to me, puta!” Tempest snarls, jabbing her finger at my face again. “You weren’t patrolling! You just walk the fucking line because you’re Sunset fucking Shimmer, and you can do whatever you fucking wa—”

“SHUT UP!”

The world rattles around me on the edge of my roar. The lights in the living room flicker, whine, and dim as I advance on Tempest, who’s gone pale. She backs away from me slowly until her back is against the wall.

“I don’t need you to tell me what to do,” I hiss. “I’m doing just fine, understand?”

She doesn’t reply, and she’s trying to glare down at me but her blue eyes are too wide with fear to pull it off. I reach up, seize her by the chin, and drag her down until we’re eye to eye.

“I said do you—?!”

My words die at the reflection of myself that I see in Tempest’s eyes. I don’t see a young woman, I see a monster. I see eyes that glow with a poisonous blackness, and amber skin that’s starting to burn red and is already shot through with icy blue veins.

I let out a slow breath, and let go, and I wince at the faint cuts I leave behind on Tempest’s face.

“I… I—” I swallow hard as I back away from Tempest, and an icy fist forms in my gut as she massages her face. “I should go…”

I put my back to Tempest and make for the door.

“Mi Sol, wait!” Tempest pleads, stopping me with a hand on my shoulder.

I freeze at the feeling of her fingers digging in. Not painfully, just firmly, and refusing to let me go.

“Get off me,” I snap and I jerk my shoulder, throwing her hand off.

“Damn it, Mi Sol!”

Her fist closes around my bicep and in that instant the world claps around me like a steel band around my windpipe. For a moment, all I can hear is the thudding of a heartbeat. My heartbeat. A Killer’s heartbeat. My vision is a grayscale tunnel, and I can’t tell if I’m the one breathing, or if the breathing is coming from over my shoulder and being squeezed through lungs plagued with fibrous knots of coal.

“GET OFF ME!” I jerk my arm free and slam it into Tempest’s chest.

She cries out as the force of my blow rips her off of her feet and sends her crashing through the coffee table and into the couch, knocking it over and throwing her tumbling past it to the wall beyond.

A cold weight settles around my heart as the panic fades and I realise what I’ve just done.

More than that, though…

There are five, shallow cuts along her abdomen along with a heavy bruise.

“Sunset?”

The apartment door creaks open and Starlight and Sour are both standing, pale-faced and exhausted, in the hallway, staring between me and Tempest. They must have been right outside… which means they heard everything.

I swallow hard as I look down at my hand. My fingers are silver and have sharpened into dull claws. I’m losing it. I’m losing my mind and my body alike.

I can’t stay here.

“I’m sorry,” I say in a choked voice. I want to cry and scream and rage all at the same time. I can’t let that out on them. Not on my friends. “Please, take care of her…” I nod at Tempest who’s sitting up in a daze. “Tell her I’m so sorry.”

Then I do what I’ve always done best.

I run away from the people who love me.

Author's Note

Another soul, battered and broken.

Part of my Marathon Fundraiser to help with my move! If you can support it please visit my Patreon!

1.9

I bolt past Starlight and Sour Sweet, racing down the unadorned white halls of our apartment building. It’s funny what you think of when your whole world is crashing down around your ears because right now all I can think is that this hall is in desperate need of a few pictures. Maybe a wall scroll.

I could dash for the elevator but I don’t have the patience. I could go for the stairs but that’s just the second verse same as the first only slightly less so.

What I sprint for is the upper courtyard. It’s called a courtyard, but it’s really just a door leading out to a section of exposed roof with reinforced railing, a few plants to spruce the place up, and a four-story drop.

I aim for the drop.

My blood is boiling. Fog is curling around me. I barrel out the door leading to the roof overlook. I hear the glass pane of the door’s window shatter, and I feel the metal crumple under the force of my impact. The strength of a Killer is nothing human, normal, or natural.

Even the cold air of Canterlot can’t clear the heat from my lungs and the burning from my veins. I need air! I need to—

I hit the railing, mantle it, and drop, and as I do the Fog explodes around me. My skin seethes to an angry red as the boiling heat finally finds purchase elsewhere, and as it leaves my veins I feel my blood run cold as ice. One moment I’m falling as Sunset Shimmer, the next I’m the real me.

Down and down and down, the way I did a lifetime ago from a certain roof of a certain school, but this time I’m the one in control! I’m the one who decides if I live or die! Not them! Not those people who called themselves my friends, and certainly not some hope-eating eldritch horror made of beetles and shit!

I flicker between the dream and the real and suddenly my coat is flapping in the wind like a black flag. I hit the ground like a missile of Fog and it billows out from around me to fill the area I land in at the base of my apartment building with unpleasant ash-and-blood particles.

“SUNSET?!”

Their voices split the night but I can barely hear them over the hammering in my ears. My heartbeat. Theirs. Maybe it’s Quill-damned Entity’s for all I know, assuming that old stain even has a heart.

Doubtful.

I take a step, flicker, and I'm on a rooftop half a mile away in the Commons near the East End. Another step, another flicker, I’m on another rooftop on the other end of the Commons. I’m not even going anywhere I’m just running. Just sprinting through the Fog, getting as close to that domain of despair and hate called the Trials as I dare to without actually stepping into it.

And I could.

Deep in my bones, I know that I could. If I really wanted to, I could go back, and the worst part is I know that the Old Stain would let me. He would welcome me back with open arms, or whatever he has that passes for arms. He would welcome back his wayward daughter and cradle me in his chitinous embrace. He would wash me clean of the human world, and bathe me in the Fog until my mind was finally free of the pain of my memories. He would take them out and give them back as knives, shiny and silver and oh-so-sharp.

I drop down onto another roof, one of a thousand, and curl up to bury my face into my knees. Everything looks the same in the Fog, so one roof is as good as any other. I curl up on the edge of the roof shaking as I fight the vibrating urges in my skull telling me to find someone worth killing and drag them screaming into the nightmare.

The euphoria is the worst.

Every time I slice into someone’s mind, dig into their hindbrain, and force them into my realm, it fills me with a kind of elation I don’t have any good comparison for.

Not anymore, anyway.

Now, the only thing that stirs my heart that way is terrifying people. Hurting them. Or worse.

I wonder how long I’ll hold out.

Adagio does her best to keep her Huntress relegated to short-as-possible forays. She travels to the city via the Fog and then retreats back to live on a defunct campground with Timber and his sister. The lack of people, she says, helps.

She doesn’t spend every free moment indulging a dangerous addiction to being the thing that nightmares are made of.

“How much longer before I’m like them?” I mutter, thinking back to the raving-mad Legion.

I wonder if they’re as addicted to their power as I am.

Taking a deep breath, in and out, I look up and out over the skyline of Canterlot. It’s my city, for now. I protect it the best I can from the danger that I brought to its streets. Every drop of blood spilled by a child of the Fog is another drop on either my hands or the Thief’s.

Between the two of us, we’re practically drowning in the stuff.

A pair of pinprick lights flicker in the periphery of my vision, and I squint down at my chest.

Two lines of light are shining brighter than the rest. Sapphire and citrine strands are trailing outwards from me and they’re almost solid, and I groan as I realise where I probably unconsciously ended up.

Even here, I can’t let her go.

Standing up from the rooftop I follow the line of light with my eyes to a dingy apartment building that’s probably seen better decades, much less days. The lines of light both terminate at the same window which prompts a memory.

What was it Zephyr had said?

She’s going to college to be a therapist, and she’s looking after her best friend at the same time…

Of course.

I take a deeper breath, and this time I’m not drawing in air. I’m breathing deeply of Canterlot’s Dreamtime, and the Fog that suffuses it. I drift into the shadows, cloaking my heartbeat as I move to the very edge of the roof I’m on. The window is one floor down, but only about ten feet from me, and it looks in on a bedroom.

If my heart were still beating it would have stopped.

Fluttershy is lying in bed half under the covers leaning against the headboard and reading a book. She’s more beautiful than I remember, from her cherubic face to her soft waterfall of pink hair. Cradled in her slender hands is a book, and although I can’t see her entirely, from the look of her bare shoulders and arms I’d say she’s probably naked beneath the blankets, sheets, and the thick comforter.

She really is the ideal beauty, and all I can see is her face twisted in grief and rage as she spits what I had thought was our friendship back at me.

You’re not our friend! You never were!

It’s almost like a silent movie. Her window is closed so all I can do is watch while Fluttershy turns the page and, halfway through, yawns, before raising her head to look over at something, or someone, else in the room. I watch her mouth move soundlessly, responding to something I think, then she smiles, and I hate that even her smile has gotten more beautiful.

I’ve just gotten uglier and more hateful.

Fluttershy sets a blue silk bookmark at her page, closes her book, and sets it down. She’s bare-chested, I realise, and a sudden itch of voyeuristic shame crawls through me as she raises a hand and holds it out.

My eyes widen as a blue hand enters the truncated picture I have through the window and takes Fluttershy’s, and Rainbow Dash sits down at the bedside. Her hair is cut short to a pixie bob, and she’s wearing a slightly damp bath towel and nothing else. Her hair is faintly wet from a fresh shower, and she’s smiling—SMILING—at Fluttershy.

This is barely the Rainbow I knew. The one I knew didn’t have so many scars. Scars in patterns like fingers made of blades dragging across flesh. She remembered me, she remembered my touch. She bled and scarred and bled and scarred over and over, I can see, even from here, the way they crosshatch over one another. She remembered me!

But for how long?

How long until she forgot?

How long until the scars in the mirror stopped reminding her of the girl that she murdered.

I can barely breathe as I watch Rainbow sidle further onto the bed, dropping her towel away as she does to bare herself, then crawls seductively towards Fluttershy who flushes a brilliant scarlet. Rainbow pushes the book away and it clatters silently off the edge of the bed between the sheets and wall, and then crawls over Fluttershy, naked and brazen, to claim her lips in a gentle, familiar kiss.

“You…” I hiss, feeling my blood turn rancid and hot in my veins. “Even you?!”

Loyal Rainbow Dash. Kind Fluttershy.

How dare they smile. How dare they just move on!

Rainbow Dash presses Fluttershy down to the bed with a kind of tender strength as she slides beneath the sheets to join her warmth before settling on top of Fluttershy, and a moment later they begin to kiss and move together. Even in the silence, I can hear their soft gasps and cries, and it sickens me.

My gorge rises as I stagger away from the edge of the roof.

Here in the Nightmare dream of Canterlot, I can scream and rage as much as I want. So I do. I put my back to Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy as if that would help bleach the image of their coupling from my mind and scream wordlessly, soundlessly, into the dark. I score the concrete roof with my fingers, slicing gouges from the manufactured stone as I rage mindlessly.

I could do it.

Right here, right now! I could walk into their little slice of dream and turn it into the blackest nightmare. I could drag them both screaming into the Fog with me and throw them at the Entity’s feet and say: ‘Look Father! Look what I’ve brought you!’

‘Aren’t you proud?’

I thrash and rage on the rooftop, clutching at my head hard enough that my own fingers slice into the skin of my scalp and temples as I try to scream out the hateful noise that’s drilling into my mind. I need to get away from here! I’m falling… I’m falling fast and far and if I’m not careful I fall right back into the Trials.

Right back into the chittering grip of that Old Stain.

With one last agonised bellow I wrap myself in the Fog, reach for somewhere in Canterlot far from this place, grip hard, and fling myself through space towards wherever I took hold of. I don’t care, all I care about is getting away from her. Away from Rainbow Dash.

I’d done so well up until now. I’d avoided her for a good reason and now… now I know it was the right decision. I should have kept to it. I shouldn’t have indulged my idiot curiosity and followed that fucking line of light, and for a moment all of my senses are drowned out in an all-consuming maw of total vertigo.

There’s no up or down, left or right. Just endless Fog in limitless darkness, and somewhere in that twisting mire of hate and despair, I blessedly black the fuck out.

I come back to consciousness slowly and only under protest and, Killer biology or no, apparently having a brief psychotic break does nothing for one’s mood.

My head is pounding as I force my eyes open and sit up, and I squint at the shift in light. It must be morning. Even though the change in the Dreamtime is only faint, the barest lightening of dark grey to grey, my eyes perceive the difference enough that it irritates me.

“Damn it.” I spit on the ground as I try to clear my throat before standing shakily.

I have no idea where I am. Everything is one giant bank of fog, and not capital-F Fog either. It’s the Dreamtime reacting to my confusion. That’s the problem with this place. It’s a reflection of the Dreamer’s mind as much as it is a reflection of the world, meaning that if I don’t know where I am, then it probably doesn’t either.

I’m somewhere coterminous with the Real, and that’s about all I know other than that I’m nowhere near them.

“Later,” I mumble, pushing the memories of… of what I’d seen away. “Time to step outside.”

Now that I’m not just projecting myself from my mind and I’m actually wearing my Killer-skin the way that Adagio does, it so much easier to step between realms. That said, the impulses to drag people into my Nightmare are a lot stronger too, so I understand why she spends as little time as possible under the mask and does her level best to avoid the city.

I don’t have that luxury for the moment, though. So I reach out and slice through the skin of the world and force myself through the Wall of Sleep.

The cold strikes me across the face hard, and I take a deep breath of air that carries a familiar scent. My feet are settled on an old concrete roof which I'm standing right at the edge of, and the vista beyond is one I never thought I’d see again.

“Horse shit,” I growl.

Then again, given the nature of my Trial back when I went near-full Killer, I guess ending up here was probably inevitable.

Canterlot High.

The place where I died.

It’s almost Christmas break, but not quite, so the school below me is buzzing with young minds. The school is a cocktail of fledgling neuroses, insecurities, hopes, dreams, and despairs, all big and small, and it’s so overwhelming that it actually helps to shut it out.

I step back from the edge, mindful that if anyone had looked up they would’ve seen a nightmare specter in black looming over them, and wrap my arms around myself.

This is bad.

I never wanted to come back to this miserable place. I’d much rather have my Trial if I had to walk its halls again. At least there, I knew every inch of it. It was mine. My Trial. My torment. And all of it under my control.

All this place reminds me of is when none of that was true.

“I should go,” I whisper into the winds. “I have to g—”

The roof door opens with a clatter of nostalgia, and the memory of it, of my last moments as a human being before I was taken, hits me hard enough that I don’t react fast enough.

“—na, I know how you feel about today, but—”

“—but nothing, sister, it was my fault and—OH MY GOD!”

My drift into the shapelessness of the Dream is fast, but not instantaneous. It takes split-seconds of time to breach the veil, and a heartbeat longer to move between worlds.

Principal Celestia and Vice Principal Luna stepped out of the roof access door at exactly the wrong time in exactly the wrong place. The sound of the door opening combined with where I am made me hesitate. For a moment, I was back on the roof two years ago, back on the razor edge of despair and right at the end of my life, and it made me hesitate just long enough.

Long enough for Luna, who was looking forward rather than up at her sister who had her head turned to regard the younger Vice Principal, to see me.

Only briefly.

She would have seen a shadow of a girl with fiery red hair streaked with gold wearing ragged black and with eyes like a cold inferno.

A bouquet of flowers hits the grounds with a distorted echo as I settle into the dream world while cursing myself for an idiot. She saw me. She saw me!

And I can’t just drag her into the dream to modify her memories. It’s the middle of the morning! She’s wide awake! And by the time night comes, the memory will be written into her long-term and at that point, the best I’ll be able to do is maybe distort it a little.

“Luna?” Celestia looks up between her sister at the edge of the roof. “Luna, what’s wrong?”

“Did… did you—?” Luna points a finger shakily at the edge of the roof. “You d-didn’t see that?”

I twitch my fingers nervously, taking comfort in the metal rasp as I watch the exchange between the two sisters. Celestia clearly looks worried, but more so for her sister’s wellbeing than for anything else. Luna, on the other, looks like she just saw a ghost because for all intents and purposes… she did.

“Luna?” Celestia repeats softly.

“I… I thought I saw…” Luna mumbles but trails off as she lowers her hand.

Luna wraps her arms around herself, tugging her dark blue jacket more tightly around herself as she kneels to gather up the bouquet with a numb expression on her face.

“Sister?” Luna starts quietly as she stares down at the blooms of the bouquet.

“Yes?”

The silence stretches out for several painfully long moments before Luna finally looks up from the flowers and starts walking towards the edge where I’m standing shrouded in the Fog of the Dreamtime.

“It really was my fault you know,” Luna says quietly.

“That’s not true,” Celestia insists.

“It is,” Luna repeats. “Even if I didn’t know it at the time, that was the moment when I could have changed things. It was right there in front of me, she was right there in front of me, and all I had to do was show a little kindness, give her a little grace, and maybe if I had she would still… s-still be—”

Luna loses her words in a wash of sobs and tears as she lowers herself to her knees slowly and sets the flowers down on the edge of the roof right at my invisible feet.

She’s not the only one crying either, Celestia is standing watch over her sister, silently weeping but keeping her sobs to herself out of respect for her sister’s pain.

“I could have stopped all of this!” Luna cries. “All I had to do was hold out a hand! She was… she was right there! She was right in front of me and I let her slip away!”

The Vice Principal’s hand is hovering inches from my boot, extended as if reaching out for someone clinging to the edge of the roof.

Celestia kneels by her sister and puts a hand on her shoulder, turning her slowly and pulling her into a hug.

“She was just a child, Celly,” Luna sobs. “She was brilliant but she was just a little girl!”

“I know,” Celestia says in a raw voice. “She was brilliant. She was so terribly bright.”

Any words that were left to the Vice Principal fall away as she starts sobbing loudly and bitterly against her sister’s shoulder. I hate so much of myself right now. I hate that there’s a certain bitter satisfaction in my chest alongside the guilt. I hate how conflicted I am about these people who were, at least in part, responsible for what happened to me.

Grief and death go hand in hand.

I remember someone saying once how it’s funny that the worst day isn’t the day that someone dies, but all the days after that they stay dead.

That they stay gone.

I hate Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy and the rest of them. I hate them because I don’t know how to do anything else anymore. There’s so little of Sunset Shimmer left in me, I think, and all that is left is the bitterness and the hate. Just the angry ghost of a dead girl wrapped in the skin of a nightmare.

But still…

“It wasn’t your fault,” I say softly, even though I know they can’t hear me. “You had the best intentions, VP… you really did, and I know you tried your best, but sometimes you can do everything in your power, do your absolute best, and still fail.”

As I turn my back on the crying sisters, I pause to look down at the bouquet. It’s an awkward looking thing made up of sunflowers, daisies, and marigolds; so much so that it takes me a moment to recognise the intent behind them. They’re all heliotropic flowers. Or in other words, they’re all flowers that, in their youth, are forever turning towards the sun.

I lean down and brush my fingers over the petals, causing them to shake and shiver unseen by the two sisters.

“You tried your best,” I say again softly before standing, turning, and reaching out to vanish again through the Fog.

Maybe it’s time I checked in on the others.

Zephyr was being hunted, and it may have been a coincidence that he just so happened to be Fluttershy’s brother, but I doubt it. I don’t believe in coincidences like that, and that means if there was intent behind it then the others might become targets as well.

I don’t know if I want to protect them, but at the very least they might make decent bait, so since I know where Rainbow and Fluttershy are and am fairly certain about Applejack too, that means I have two more to look over.

Rose or Opal.

Eenie meenie minie moe.

Author's Note

Mortality clarified...

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1.10

Daytime, nighttime, it’s all the same in the Dreamtime.

Ignoring the vague shift in the ambient light, the only other change is the fewer dreaming minds filling the empyreal spaces I’m walking through since more people are awake. Actual timetables have always been fairly useless in this place.

For one, time is relative, and a distant one at that. Space is even moreso.

With a tug at the skin of the world, I propel myself through the Fog. Even awake, I can feel the whispering minds of Canterlot. They’re not as vulnerable now as they are when they’re sleeping, but I can still sense them the way a wolf can smell an unwounded hart. True, it may not be the easiest pickings but hey…

Meat is meat.

When I step out of the Fog it’s onto the sidewalk that stretches down a well-traveled street in the ‘burbs of Canterlot. Here, the quaint and the urban meet with a kind of seamless grace that isn’t found often, and at the heart of that grace is a little cafe, bakery, and confectionery called Sugarcube Corner.

Crowds of people pass through me like so much mist on this cold morning as they slip in and out of the cafe for a warm beverage. Coffee, hot chocolate, chai tea, and everything in between is poured down the parched gullet of the Ponyville Commons, and while the food and drink is definitely a drawing factor, in my day there was a more pointed pull to the place.

One employee, specifically.

“Order up!”

The relentlessly cheerful voice of Pinkamena ‘Pinkie’ Pie escapes the doorway as it opens, and I slip between the crowds and into the Corner.

Usually, physical voices are dull, distant things to my ears, but not hers. Pinkie’s voice is as clear as a clarion bell despite the dimensional distance. Not only that, while everyone else in the cafe are just spectral shapes outlined by Fog and the whispers of their unsleeping minds, Pinkie is sharp and defined.

She’s wearing flowing, layered skirts in festive greens and whites and golds, and for all the world looks like someone turned a Christmas tree into a dress. There’s garland around her collar, and mistletoe hanging from her ears like earrings, and she’s the only one here that I can see absolutely clearly.

I wonder if it’s because of our connection, or if it's just something inherent to Pinkie. I always thought there was something more… ephemeral… about her than the rest of my former friends. Something more fae.

Pinkie is simultaneously working the register and the bar with the expertise that comes from years of practice honing true talent. One moment, she’s ringing someone up, the next she’s prepping an espresso, then topping off the head of foam on a latte with unique art of balloons, Christmas trees, sleigh bells, and other puerile, happy things.

And there isn’t a single customer who doesn’t leave without a smile on their face.

Time is strange here in the Dreamtime. It flows like a river of silk; the moment you grasp it you can slow it down, but lose your grip and it races away from you.

I watch her for a time. For hours, maybe. I watch her sling drinks and talk. She moves from conversation to conversation like a pixie, never faltering in her good cheer until finally, at sometime around the noon hour, I think, she pauses and flags down one of the owners during a lull in the rush.

“I’m going on break Missus Cake!” Pinkie says brightly.

“Take a long one, dear,” Cup Cake says with a soft smile. “You’ve been at it for hours, and… well, I know how hard this season is for you.”

Pinkie’s cheerful expression fades. It’s strange to watch, like seeing a normally extroverted person step back into the shadows of a room during a party, but her smile stays in place albeit smaller than before.

“It’s okay,” Pinkie says. “I just… I just want to have a cup of coffee, that’s all.”

“There are sandwiches in the back for lunch, okay?” Cup Cake replies. “Have one, please? For me?”

Rather than answer, Pinkie leans in and wraps Cup Cake in a warm hug. Then she steps back, turns, and moves sedately back into the rear kitchen of the cafe.

I follow behind, unseen and undetected, past the front counter, around Cup Cake who shivers as I pass, and back into the kitchen with Pinkie. The lights in the kitchen are dim, but Pinkie doesn’t bother to turn on the brighter ones. Instead, she moves to a small shelf near the coffee maker that has a single occupant: an old chipped coffee mug.

The mug isn't ornate or, in fact, adorned with anything at all; it’s a faded white ceramic mug that had probably seen a half-dozen owners before Pinkie.

Its last owner had picked it up at a garage sale from a freebie bin and taken it because she hadn’t had anything else to drink out of, and had felt unreasonably fortunate at the find. She’d expected it to last maybe a month or two before the chip on the rim turned into a crack, but it didn’t. It just kept holding together.

Pinkie lifts my mug up off the shelf with something like reverence and sets it down next to the coffee maker just as it chimes with a full, fresh brew.

She picks up the carafe carefully by the handle, tips it to pour the coffee slowly into the mug, then replaces the carafe and moves the mug from the counter to the island in the middle of the kitchen before pulling her phone from one of the many, many pockets in her voluminous skirts.

For a moment, Pinkie fiddles with the back of the phone, before popping a little stand out from the case and setting it down so it’s facing her about a half-meter away at the other end of the island.

“One black coffee,” Pinkie says quietly. “Order up.”

She pushes the coffee mug forward until it’s resting in front of her phone, and I step around behind her to look at it, sharpening my focus to bring the shadowed device into clarity.

The screen is a picture of a girl with flame-and-gold hair with her arm slung over Pinkie’s shoulders, and they’re both making faces at the camera.

They’re both smiling.

“Two years,” Pinkie says. “I… I don’t know how it’s been two years.”

Her voice is subdued and reedy, nothing like her vivacious ‘service’ voice.

“Time waits for no one, Pinks,” I reply, even knowing she can’t hear me.

“I uhm… I know you probably still hate us,” Pinkie continues, “and I don’t blame you. But I miss you a whole lot… everything’s kind of come apart since you—”

Pinkie pauses, and her face takes on a far-off quality. It’s like watching the animating force just drain out of something. Like an animatronic mannequin suddenly bereft of power. Then her chest hitches and a tear rolls down her face, which she sweeps away with a finger before closing her eyes and taking a deep breath.

When she opens her eyes again, they’re clear blue and free of tears.

“—since you passed,” she says shakily before forcing a smile onto her face that slowly gets more genuine. “It’s funny… I think even if all this bad stuff still happened but had nothing to do with you? You’d be able to pull us back together. I like to think so anyway.”

“Not my circus, not my monkeys,” I say bitterly. “You five had your chances and so did I…”

“I wish—” Pinkie’s voice hitches again, and the tears come back as she bows her head. “I w-wish I could ask you what to do. Fluttershy and Rainbow won’t talk to AJ at all—”

I grit my teeth and fight off the urge to lash out at those words. The memories of their… coupling… is still way too fresh in my mind. That’s something I did not need to see and needed even less to be reminded of.

“—not since what happened after Rainbow got out of the hospital.”

Hospital?

The scars… but if she was in the hospital prior to this then Aria had to have heard about it. There’s no way she wasn’t keeping some kind of tabs on those five right? But if she had then why…

I snort derisively.

Aria knew. She had to have known. There’s no way that Rainbow Dash, of all people, went into the hospital through anywhere but the Emergency Department, and if that’s the case then Aria couldn’t possibly have missed it.

Meaning she’d been hiding it.

“I’ve tried to t-talk to Fluttershy about it but whenever I do she just gets so mad, and then she stops talking to me for a while,” Pinkie sobs. “A-And I haven’t seen Rarity in months. She w-won’t return my calls, and she doesn’t answer at her door. AJ just ignores us all now, and…”

Pinkie wraps her arms around herself, curling inward like there’s a knife in her gut as she bites back her sobs.

“I just miss you so much,” Pinkie whispers. “I miss my friends so much.”

Slowly, I reach out and settle my spectral hand on her shoulder.

“Me too,” I say quietly. “It… It could’ve gone different. It all could have gone different.”

Of all of the girls, I think it’s hardest for me to stay angry at Pinkie Pie. It’s that fae quality. The childlike part of her that feels so innocent. Pinkie is someone whose trust is easily gained, easily lost, and easily damaged. She’s far more delicate than anyone really appreciates because she puts on such a bright smile.

I can’t look at Rainbow without feeling hatred, and the same is true of the others to varying degrees, although I haven’t looked in on Rarity yet I can only assume it will be the same.

But Pinkie…

Sighing, I turn away from Pinkie and move to the opposite end of the island. It takes an effort of will, but I put just enough into the Real that I can move the small stool out.

The creak of wood against the tile floor makes Pinkie start, and she looks up and around in a panic. Probably she’s looking for the Cakes. She doesn’t want them to see her like this because they’ll worry. That’s very ‘Pinkie Pie’. Always more concerned with the happiness of others over her own.

With the stool pulled out, I sweep my jacket back and take a seat, then reach out and over Pinkie’s cell to hover my hand over the coffee mug I used to own, then flick my hand back to waft the fragrant steam towards me as I take a deep breath.

It smells good.

Pinkie turns to stare down at the mug, and at the steam that’s suddenly drifting towards the picture of her and I.

“S...Sunset?” she murmurs hollowly.

I don’t answer.

In the end, I’m still dead, and I always will be. But maybe Pinkie can find some kind of peace. I think out of all them, that bothers me the least.

Pinkie sniffles then swallows hard before smiling weakly.

“I’m uhm… m-maybe I’m just going crazy, but… but on the off-chance I’m not?”

Pinkie swallows hard and looks up and over the picture directly at me, and even though I know she can’t see me, her soft, baby-blue eyes freeze me in place.

“I miss you, Sunset,” she says, putting a hand on the handle of the mug. “We all do. And I’m so sorry. A-And I love you… and I wish you were still here. I wish you could try my coffee now. I know I used to burn it before, but you always drank it down anyway. I’ve gotten a lot better though, and I… I wish I could show you.”

“I know,” I answer, even though she can’t hear me.

I put my hand over hers; a hand of flesh-and-blood, and a hand of dreams and nightmares. One real, one not. One living… one dead.

Pinkie smiles as she tightens her grip on the coffee mug then takes another deep breath before drawing it back to herself while smiling.

“One black coffee,” she whispers under her breath. “Order up.”

She puts the mug to her lips and drinks deep, swallowing until the mug is empty. When she lowers it, it’s only to set it back in front of the picture of the two girls.

“I’ll bet it was good,” I say, trying to smile and distantly succeeding.

Some of the air goes out of Pinkie Pie as she stares down at the empty mug and the phone screen behind it, and I frown as she looks back up at the space where I am. Where I know she can’t see me, but despite that, her eyes fix on mine all the same.

What is it about her?

“Something’s wrong, Sunset,” Pinkie says in a brittle voice. “If… If you are there… something—no, everything—is wrong. Canterlot is wrong and I…” her face scrunches into that soft, childlike expression, “and I’m scared.”

The stool grinds softly against the tile as I stand, and Pinkie starts again from her seat. This time she doesn’t look around, she just stares at the space across from her.

She can’t see me, so she doesn’t see me move around the island. She doesn’t see me move behind her, and she doesn’t see me wrap my arms around her from behind. It’s easier this way, for me at least.

It’s easier if she can’t see me.

I put just enough into myself that she might be able to feel a whisper of pressure as I give in, just this once, in the dark, in the back room of a little cafe, with no one else around to judge me or see me, and I give one of the girls who killed me a hug.

Pinkie freezes as the pressure settles around her, and then she breaks and starts to cry as she hangs her head again. She reaches up and around herself trying to find me and failing, but I stay where I am for a while and fight back the urge to drag her into the nightmare; the urge to kill. I fight it for long enough to feel a little bit human again.

It’s just a few minutes.

Just long enough for her to stop crying.

“I’m sorry.”

I close my eyes and sigh.

“Yeah,” I say softly. “I know.”

If I had to choose one of them to forgive… if I had to let one and only one of them back in, it would probably be Pinkie Pie. But that’s a decision for the living.

“I loved you too, you know,” I say quietly. “I loved you all.”

Then I stand, breathe out, and turn away from Pinkie Pie to leave the kitchen and the Corner. Winter winds in Canterlot bite hard, and the shades of the people I follow out of the cafe shiver as they step back onto the street.

Pinkie Pie is safe for now, at least as far as I know. I can’t taste the Fog around Sugarcube Corner, but that may not mean much. At least I know she’s still here, so I can keep checking in. I have no doubt that eventually these fragments of harmony will be pulled in to whatever is going on in Canterlot,

For now, though, she’s safe.

The last one to check on is…

I reach out for the cookie-cutter suburbs of Whitetail, feeling for the mind of the girl who was once my friend, seize the skein of the Real, and pull.

My boots strike pavement in front of a familiar home. One I had occasion to visit in happier days.

For a moment, I can’t move forward. All I can do is stare at the doorway as memories assail me. Everything was good back then. Even if it was all a lie, it was still a pleasant one, and a part of me desperately wishes I could go back to those days when I really thought that they cared.

When I thought that there was hope.

I push past the memories and step out of the Fog, still immaterial, to stop in front of the door to the home of one Rarity Belle.

Her parents, to my knowledge, aren’t around much. Her father, for all his apparent bluster and joviality, was, and likely still is, a successful investment specialist. In other words, he makes more money than Faust just by taking a nap. Thanks to that, Hondo and his wife, Cookie, were always on vacation back then, and given the lack of activity in the home, I suspect that’s probably still the case.

I slip past the door and into the home, letting my eyes fall to soft focus as I direct my attention to my other, less physical senses.

A mind is nearby, a familiar one, and given the light of the opal thread and the way it points me, I don’t have to question who it belongs to.

Stepping through the small entrance hall, I pass the kitchen. It’s not as neat as I remember. There are messes here and there, dirty dishes, bits of trash. Nothing excessive, but the Rarity I remembered was fastidiously clean and tidy.

The den is much the same. There are two loads of unfolded laundry and from the look of things they’ve been there a while. The couch is taken up by a half-hearted attempt to get through one of the baskets but was clearly given up on quickly.

I follow the thread, although it doesn’t lead upstairs to Rarity’s room. It leads into the back room where I happen to know her little workshop lay. At least, it did two years ago.

Passing through the door like a specter, I stumble at what I see.

Even in the half-light of the Dreamtime, this room is claustrophobically dark, and it looks nothing like I remember. The table that once held Rarity’s sewing machine and various fashion paraphernalia related to the device now has a massive, three-screen computer setup occupying it. Strewn around the room are boxes that contain folds of fabric and half-finished outfits that haven’t been touched in quite some time.

Rarity herself is seated at the computer looking like someone I barely recognise. Gone are the delicate coifs of purple and the meticulously applied makeup and foundation. Instead, the young woman who sits at the computer, illuminated by the dull wash of the screen’s light, looks haggard and thready.

Her hair hangs lank around a face that's pallid from a lack of sunlight, and there are bags under Rarity’s eyes which the looks-obsessed girl that I remembered would never have permitted. Her slender fingers are dirty with stains from food, and her fingernails are chipped and chewed. She tap-tap-taps away at the keyboard, flicking through…

I lean over her shoulder to examine what she’s looking at.

Disappearances.

Missing Persons.

Public cold case files.

These aren't just from Canterlot, either, but from all over the nation. All over the world actually. There are files on her desktop whose names are in a half-dozen different languages.

“Where are you?”

I stumble back at the faint whisper from Rarity, and it takes me a moment to realise that she isn’t talking to me.

She sighs heavily and hangs her head before flicking her mouse to a file near the middle of her main screen labeled ‘Main’, opening it with a double-click, and then opening up a subfile labeled ‘Posters’.

Rarity sets the file to print, and a printer beneath her desk chugs to life and starts spooling up.

“Why can’t I ever learn before it’s too late?” Rarity mumbles as she leans back and rubs at her eyes.

She reaches under her and pulls out a small stack of papers, shuffling them a little to get them in order. I look down at the picture and my breath catches in my throat.

It’s a ‘missing persons’ poster made with the same eye for detail that Rarity does everything with, except the face on the poster is familiar.

Sweetie Belle

The whole time I’d been looking in on missing people, I’d ignored the girls who had been most directly involved in my death. That, I realise now, had been stupid. It had been a blind spot I’d let myself indulge in because I didn’t care about them. If they got taken by the Entity so much the better.

They deserved it. Right?

Except, back then I’d been missing crucial bits of information that were only now starting to piece themselves together in my mind.

Rarity cradles the posters with shaky hands. Her eyes are red, and she looks completely spent. I can’t even imagine when the last time she slept was which meant—

“I think,” I say as I reach out my finger blades toward Rarity, “that we need to talk.”

One blade slips through her tangled locks to slice into the dreamflesh of her body, digging deep into her brain and flooding it with my will. I let the Fog of my power soak into her soul, and the last thing Rarity hears before she slumps down to her desk and the posters fall from her hands to scatter across the floor is my laughter bubbling past my lips as I exert my influence over her.

“SlEeP”

My voice comes out distorted and mangled as the dream overtakes us. Rarity falls deep, deep into slumber, and where she falls, I follow.

Author's Note

The wounds of war can be healed, but never hidden.

Part of my Marathon Fundraiser to help with my move! If you can support it please visit my Patreon!

1.11

Music is playing through the house; a soft, classical piece I can’t quite place, but that’s not surprising. Music is a funny thing in the Dreamtime, especially in a person’s own private dreams. Often songs or tunes are made up of hodge-podges of half-remembered melodies and nonsense lyrics from a dozen different songs.

Straightening out, I take stock of my surroundings.

I’m still in Rarity’s workroom, but it’s a lot more like I remember it being before the Trials and the Nightmare. There are scatterings of fabric, bits and pieces of cloth, partially finished dresses on manne…quins…

“Wait,” I narrow my eyes at them, then recoil.

Not mannequins.

Corpses.

There are no discernable features, but the stitch-covered horror adorned with a partially completed dress is clearly a dead body. The dress itself is dirty and stained at the edges, and as I step back and look around I realise that what I had initially took for fabric isn’t fabric at all.

“Bandages?” I kneel down and scoop up a handful of bloody bandages, and as I pick them up a few bloody-tipped needles fall from the mess.

Looking up, I glance across the room and find more used bandages and needles, more signs of blood and quiet violence.

“Rarity…” I say softly as I stand, “what happened to make your dreams this dark?”

Trauma.

This is deep and abiding trauma. Something terrible happened to her in this past year and change, and it left more scars than I’m comfortable counting.

“Where are you?” I mutter, discarding the handful of bloody bandages.

I make my way out of the workroom. It’s almost obscene how well-lit everything is. The light suffusing Rarity’s dream is a soft, fuzzy shade that makes it hard to focus on any one thing, which may be on purpose. It’s probably her mind trying to block out parts of the damage.

Repress the trauma.

Except Rarity is too sharp for that. She knows what’s in her own head and now she’s scratching at it like a scab, refusing to let it go, or let it heal or scar over.

Something is keeping her from the closure she needs to do that, and I’m willing to bet it’s her missing sister.

The den is superficially fine, but I don’t take that for granted. Instead, I focus, trying to push past the static light and get a read on the room.

The television is playing something… it reminds me of CCTV footage from an old security camera, and in the video is Sweetie Belle. She’s in the kitchen with her back to the ‘camera’, and she’s at the counter in front of a cutting board chopping vegetables.

Chop, chop, chop, chop.

The sound is like a metronome and it’s eerily unsettling. I turn away from the screen to look over the rest of the living room.

Another bundle of leftover stained bandages are hanging from the arm of the couch, and there are needles pinning it in place. I brush my fingerblades across the fabric, touching the metal needles briefly, and as I do a sharp, metallic noise pierces my ears like tinnitus turned up to eleven.

“Ah! Shit!” I press my palm to my forehead as I stagger back from the needles before mumbling, “okay… bad memories, got it, no touchy the needles.”

I step away from the den towards the kitchen, and as I do I pass the steps going upstairs. The moment I do, I stagger as a sudden weight settles on me, and I turn my head to stare up the steps. Unlike everywhere else, up there is dark. It’s pitch black, actually, which is weird for me. I haven’t really perceived darkness the same way since I was taken to the Trials for the first time and remade to survive there.

This isn’t real darkness though. It’s a darkness of the mind. A dark spot in Rarity’s memories. A dream of a dream of a nightmare.

Something she doesn’t want to see.

Behind me I can hear the television still playing.

Chop, chop, chop, chop.

Before I can pursue that line of thought further, the door at the far end of the kitchen which leads to Rarity’s back yard clatters open, and Rarity bustles in looking prim and proper, but clean. She’s carrying a vase with wilted flowers in one hand, a fresh bouquet in another, and she practically power walks to the sink, dumps out the water from the vase into the sink, then dumps the flowers into the trash before placing the new bouquet.

“They always go so fast,” Rarity mutters. “Why can’t keep them fresh enough?”

“Rarity?” I say cautiously.

She doesn’t react. She just tips the vase gently beneath the kitchen faucet and begins filling it with…

“What the f—” I trail off as I step so close to Rarity that I’m craning over her shoulder to see what’s coming out of the faucet.

Sure enough, it’s what I thought I saw from the corner of my eye. Coming out of the spout in a thick, viscous pour, is blood. It’s like Rarity just plugged a spigot into someone’s artery and turned it on.

Slowly, I turn to stare at Rarity in confusion.

“Seriously, Rares,” I say quietly. “What the fuck happened to you?”

This was some grim shit for a Survivor to be dreaming of. I might expect something like this if I poked into Rainbow Dash’s head—not that I’d ever try it since I’d probably go ballistic and sleep-murder her—but from Rarity? Proper and prissy Rarity? Dreaming of blood and gore is incredibly out of character.

She can’t even watch horror movies.

Or at least, she didn’t used to be able to.

“There, that should be enough,” Rarity says briskly as she turns the faucet off and tips the vase back. “Really now, this shouldn't be so difficult.”

Turning on her heel, Rarity walks back through the kitchen toward the door, and I follow her, leaving behind the house and the chop, chop, chop, chop of the television set.

She nudges the porch door open with her hip as she cradles the full vase with care and steps outside. I make it to the porch just behind and have to stop again to stare.

“Wow.”

I can’t really think of anything else to say. Just ‘Wow’.

In the middle of Rarity’s backyard, rather than a neatly kept lawn, is an enormous, knotted, diseased-looking tree. Its branches are twisted and gnarled, and there isn’t a single leaf on it. I’m not sure it’s dead though. In fact, my gut instinct is saying it’s not. I have no idea what it means, although I can venture a guess as to what the things hanging from it mean.

From the highest branches, better than half a dozen familiar corpses hang suspended, each from their own noose.

Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie, and Fluttershy hang nearest the ground, their bodies unblemished but clearly dead. Above their heads dangle the feet of Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo, and while the youngest Apple daughter looks like the others, Sweetie and Scootaloo are both different types of mangled.

Rarity’s little sister is missing her arms, and the gory stumps look like they were chewed and worried at by wild dogs. Scootaloo is a mess of broken bones and bruised flesh, and hangs limp with disconnected joints.

And lynched from the highest branch, wavering in the breeze, is my own body, split and broken by a long, terrible fall.

“Why can’t anyone just move the fuck on?” I mutter. “They hated me. They never trusted me… not really.”

Rarity stops at the base of the tree and kneels to set down the vase, pressing into the mud and dirt to drive the base of it into the soil.

“Rarity,” I call out from the deck of the porch. “Hey! Rares!”

Nothing. She’s too deep in her own dream.

I guess I’ll have to reach her from that side rather than bringing her over here. On the upside, she won’t remember shit about this dream. It’s a lot easier to erase memories from that end even if it’s probably going to be a pain in the ass.

“Abracadabra,” I mutter as I reach out with my fingers and slice through the thin membrane that separates the larger Dreamtime with Rarity’s own personal nightmare, then tip forward and—

CRACK

Bones snap as the air rattles through my shattered body. I spasm and jerk in place, dancing like a marionette on a single, rope string as my vision pivots and swings vertiginously from where I had been a heartbeat ago on the back porch to where I am now, high up in the boughs of a not-dead tree with a noose around my broken neck.

“F-Fuck,” I snarl as blood bubbles from between my lips.

Everything hurts. My back is broken, my ribs are too, all of them. My arms are snapped and my legs are cracked and fractured. I can feel bone grinding on bone and something wet squelches inside of me every time I move and thrash.

Even if this is just a dream… it hurts like a bitch.

I focus and breathe, drawing Fog from beyond the skin of Rarity’s dream to take control, at least a little bit. Enough to pull myself together.

Bones snap back into alignment, ruptured flesh knits turning catastrophic damage into merely grievous wounds. The worst of the internal damage rights itself as I take a breath, then another, and another, each one clearer than the last, and once I get some feeling back into my extremities I force my broken jaw to move around words that are wet with blood.

“Still grieving me, Rarity?”

She freezes far below me with her hands still on the vase. The flowers are already starting to rot and die.

Slowly, Rarity raises her head to look up the tree to the suspended dream-facsimile of my corpse that I’m now occupying. It was the closest thing to myself that I could jump into in her Dream. Doing anything else would have been orders of magnitude more uncomfortable for me, and possibly harmful to her.

“Sunset?” Rarity murmurs. “I… You…”

“You seemed pleased enough to be rid of me before,” I croak. “Why guilt yourself over it now?”

“It was a mistake,” she sobs. “We made a mistake.”

“Mistakes have consequences.”

I twist my head down to see her more clearly. You’d be surprised how hard it is to maneuver your head when you’ve got a broken neck.

“I know,” Rarity sobs. “I know… I’m so sorry, I should have known, darling, but it’s all gone so wrong.”

“Are you so surprised she ran?” I ask, looking down between my feet at Sweetie Belle’s body that’s creaking back and forth in the faint breeze. “She must have been miserable.”

“No,” Rarity says wetly. “After Scootalo—after all of that, she vanished… just like you. Maybe she was taken, or maybe she’s just dead in a ditch somewhere.”

After Scootaloo… what? I narrow my eyes at her, then look back down at Scootaloo’s body, then back up to Rarity.

Something happened to her, maybe to all of them but definitely those two. I would have to look into it, but with that said I can’t deny the possibility that Sweetie Belle was taken back to the Trials by the Entity. The Old Stain is still alive, I know that much. It’s wounded, maybe mortally, but it won’t die for a good long time, and until it does it will do what every dying thing in the history of ever has tried to do.

Survive.

It’s going to try to recoup its losses, reap new sources of hope, and a teen in despair is a prime target. I should know.

That said, it would be kind of a slap in the face if Sweetie was taken considering the amount of trouble the others went to to try and rescue those three brats during my little jailbreak two years ago.

Rarity is still on her knees, shaking.

“I can still see you falling,” she says in a strained voice. “That day in school, I remember looking out the window, and thinking about… about a dress or something… a coat maybe… and then I saw you, just a flash of gold and red and black, and then nothing.”

I never knew she’d seen me, although, in fairness, I haven’t really been in a position to ask around since I took my long walk off a short rooftop.

“You abandoned me when I needed you,” I say through the rattle of a brittle and shattered chest. “And then you abandoned her.”

“I… I suppose I never learn, do I?”Rarity says, and her voice comes out dark and hollow.

“Some people never do.”

She doesn’t reply, she just nods, then stands up in a mechanical manner that suggests rote motion before turning on her heel again to walk towards the house.

With an effort of will, I release my hold on her dream and let it catapult me out of it. The sheer relief of not being in a body broken by a four-story drop is ecstasy all by itself, and I stumble in euphoric bliss for a moment as my own powerful senses reassert themselves when I manifest at the base of the tree. I flick my fingers, rasping the blades against one another and taking comfort in the familiar sound of metal-on-metal before steadying myself and looking around.

Rarity is going back inside, and I move to follow her. I’m out of her little dream-bubble so she can’t see me anymore, and I get the feeling I just made her nightmare worse which isn’t surprising.

I couldn’t help picking at the festering wound though. Petty and spiteful it might have been but I just couldn’t help it.

“What happened here?” I mutter as I step through the door and into the kitchen.

Rarity’s long, lovely legs are ascending the staircase into the darkness, and I frown as my stomach twists. I don’t want to go up there. She doesn’t want me to go up there. I don’t think she even wants to be up there herself but something is compelling her.

Guilt. Self-hatred. Despair.

It’s all the same shit.

“Rarity!” I snarl her name as I slam the door shut and make it into the den.

Chop, chop, chop, chop.

“Rari—!”

The sound of a dull blade splitting flesh is a curious noise. When it’s deep and intentional, it sounds like leather being ripped and then the hiss and splash of arterial spray as the heart pumps splatters of blood as heavy thud rattles the whole house, and gore dribbles down the steps in miniature waterfalls just as the house shatters with an almighty crack! And I’m flung out of the dreaming mind of Rarity Belle.

The dim workroom comes back into focus along with the mother of all headaches as my senses reorder themselves back into something cogent.

Rarity jerks awake at her desk, her eyes wide and frantic as she puts a hand to her neck. She’s hyperventilating and crying, making tiny, wheezing sobs that I realise is the only sound she’s capable of making at all right now.

As I steady myself, Rarity dives under her desk and flails around for something before sitting back up gripping a black aluminum can. She cracks the tab and immediately puts it to her lips and starts chugging.

I raise an eyebrow as I lean in to examine it.

Hellion

I know a few EMT’s back at Canterlot General that swear by that particular energy drink but even they say you shouldn’t drink more than one a night. A quick glance under the table shows an entire case of the damn things pushed a little further back, but still within easy reach.

“That cannot be healthy,” I say dryly as Rarity lowers the now-empty can and takes a deep, ragged breath.

“Oh my, that was… much worse than usual,” Rarity mutters as she rubs at her face. “Now uhm, ahem, where was I—Oh, right.”

The missing person posters she’d printed off lay scattered around her feet where they fell when I pushed her off the precipice into the Dreamtime, and Rarity heaves a quiet if dramatic sigh as she crouches to start gathering them up.

Everyone’s having nightmares apparently, and despite them being about me I, the dream demon, ironically have nothing to do with it. They’re just flaying themselves over their own guilt.

“Not my problem,” I say bitterly. “You all made this bed, not me.”

Turning my back on Rarity with a deep scowl, I leave the little home that once might have had good memories for me. Pinkie and Rarity were okay, for certain definitions. Nothing a fuckton of therapy won’t help with at least, but I’d be surprised if even one of them was bothering with it.

Maybe Pinkie, if only because the Cakes would be pushing for it. She definitely seemed like the most well-adjusted of my former friends and saying that about Pinkie Pie of all people just goes to show how bad things have really gotten.

So, Apple Bloom is being ostracised by her family, Sweetie is missing in action, and something happened to Scootaloo which definitely doesn’t sound ominous or anything. Hopefully there’s something online I can look up, maybe it will give me a lead or at least eliminate a few possibilities.

I step outside and pause on the sidewalk in front of Rarity’s home.

None of this should be going so badly, but it is and it’s becoming more and more difficult not to feel responsible for it all.

I hate this. I shouldn’t have to feel bad that the girls who helped push me to suicide, even if only by accident, are spiraling downwards. All that should mean is that they feel guilty for something that they definitely deserve to feel guilty about.

“Damn it.” I turn and start walking.

It’s getting late and there are enough sleepers to ping-pong myself off of that I could go almost anywhere in the city except…

Except I don’t even know where I want to go.

Home?

I don’t have a home. I have an apartment I share with three people who can barely look at me and a bed that I share with a woman I just flung across a room, and the sick part is that I know if I were to go back it would be Tempest apologising to me.

Assuming she’s even still there.

Lacking any other direction, I make my way towards the border between Whitetail and the Ponyville Commons. I pass by the occasional person or couple walking the same sidewalk, their features shrouded by the Fog. I’m invisible to them, and to everyone else, and I’m happy to keep it that way.

Sometimes, it’s better to be unseen.

It’s certainly easier.

Canterlot is a funny place. Unlike a lot of cities its divisions aren’t just lines on a map, they’re scars in the land. Where Whitetail stops and the Canterlot Heights begins is where the steep gradient of the mountains begins to arch upward; it’s where the flat, even spaces of the suburbs turn into the picturesque switchbacks that crawl past stretches of exorbitantly expensive plots of land occupied by fat, architectural McMansions belonging to people just rich enough to claw their way out of the middle class.

But that’s to the north. I’m going east towards downtown.

Between Whitetail and Canterlot City itself is the place where I went to school and later pitched myself off the roof of. Canterlot High is settled right near the border between Whitetail and the more urban stretch of the city, but it’s technically still a part of Whitetail itself because that little cookie-cutter suburban hellscape ends, and the dirt-poor part of town begins, along the shores of the River Canter.

Ponyville Commons isn’t what you’d call a nice place, but I guess it’s better than the East End. People who live in the Commons do so because it’s cheaper than anywhere else in the Canterlot Metro area, and it shows in their walk and their look and in the clothes they wear.

They’re the poor kids, attached to the moderately tidier neighborhood of Whitetail by a single, expansive bridge that crosses the Canter’s icy floes, and that’s where I eventually find myself.

I stop in the middle of the bridge and turn to lean against the rail and look down at the rushing water of the river.

For the first time in a long time, I realise I don’t want to be in the Dreamtime. I want to be in the Real, breathing the cold air and listening to the water rush beneath me. I don’t want to hear it through the Fog-crushed filter of static. I don’t want the muted smells and distant sensations, so on a lark I focus, cut the skein, and force myself through the veil, and as I do I put away the skin of Nightmare Sunset.

I shiver as the cold air bites and the world of sound rushes against my ears, and for the first time in a very long time, ‘Sunset Shimmer’ steps back into the real world, with Whitetail on my right, the Commons on my left, and me standing in between.

Always in between.

“How poetic.” I tug my jacket closer around myself as I lean against the rail again, relishing the cold burn of the icy metal.

“Uhm, w-where did you just come from?”

I blink several times at the soft voice that just piped up, then slowly turn my head.

Standing not ten feet away from me is a young woman who couldn’t be any older than me or Aria, staring at me.

Her hair is a long, bushy tangle the color of morning glory vines that stretches down her back all the way to her waist that frames a face dotted with freckles and a pair of soft brown eyes. Her skin is a fair complexion of pale green, and she’s wearing a dark coat that stretches to her knees, winter gloves, and a pair of black boots.

And she’s practically right next to me and clearly had been for some time.

“Uh…” I look around nervously, then chuckle and start to hold out a hand. “I uh, kinda sneak up on people sometimes, sorry, I’m—”

“Sunset Shimmer.”

The bottom falls out of my stomach at the sound of my name—my real name—coming from this unknown girl’s lips.

“We went to Canterlot High together but…” the girl shakes her head in disbelief. “You… you died.”

Well… shit.

Author's Note

Compassion is a rarity in the fevered pitch...

Part of my Marathon Fundraiser to help with my move! If you can support it please visit my Patreon!

Interlude 2 - Employee of the Month

Serenity of Canterlot is, as far as recovery facilities go, a relatively nice one, especially considering its position between the Commons and the East End. It’s a large, three-story building whose first level consisted largely of visiting areas, recreation rooms, and small offices for counseling services, and whose second and third floors were mostly given over to rooms for inpatient residents trying to get clean.

Normally, Serenity is true to its name as a quiet place, but lately, things in the area have been bad… well, worse than usual anyway. This neighborhood is always troubled, but with all the deaths and chaos things have gone downhill even by the East End’s standards.

“We’re sure our guy’s here?” Sterling Standard says, leaning out of the window of the police cruiser to stare up at the off-white building. “A drug house?”

“A recovery facility, Stand,” his partner replies testily. “These people are trying to get better.”

“Once a junkie, always a junkie,” Sterling says flatly as he steps out onto the sidewalk. “Shit, I hate this side’a town.”

Sterling Standard didn’t think of himself as a bad guy as far as Canterlot police detectives went. He was getting older, sure, and put on a few pounds, but he’d been on the force for over twelve years and had seen a lot more of Canterlot’s bad sides than good. If he were being honest, and if he had his choice, he’d retire tomorrow, but he’d only get his pension after fifteen years of service, so he resigned himself to doing the job for another few years.

It wasn’t that he was bad at it, at least he didn’t think so, he was just tired.

His partner, an up-and-comer named Shining Armor, is practically the poster child for the ‘good cop’; early twenties and good looking, clean-cut with a strong jawline and a sometimes-frustrating can-do attitude, the kid had stormed up to the rank of detective in record time, with less than five years on the force, and he’d ended up in homicide.

Armor is sharp, but he’s also still an idealist, like a lot of young cops, and Canterlot has a nasty a tendency to chew those types up and then spit them out. Sterling wasn’t looking forward to the day that happened to Shining Armor. He’s a nice kid, he deserved better than Canterlot.

“Not every ‘junkie’ is there because they want to be,” Shining replies as he steps out and combs his fingers through his short, ice-blue-and-white hair before straightening his long coat. “Some of them are just in a bad spot.”

“Tell that to the poor fucks they mug for drug money,” Sterling says dryly.

“That’s not fair, Stand.” Shining shuts the door hard and glares at Sterling who just smirks back at the younger detective. “Now c’mon, it took me half a year to track this guy down and I’d prefer not to miss our appointment.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Sterling waves a hand dismissively. “I’m telling you, though… this is a dead end.”

“We’ll see.”

Sterling and Shining ascend the few steps and push the heavy doors open, a rush of warm air greets them as they enter the main lobby of Serenity of Canterlot.

“Welcome to Serenity.”

A short girl in scrubs is sitting at the desk. The name on her ID tag is Ace, but her full name is Aces Wild, and she’d been at Serenity for four years. The first year was spent occupying one of the rooms on the second floor as an inpatient, and the last three had been spent as an employee; first a volunteer, then, after she got her degree, as a full-time CNA.

She narrows her eyes at the pair of men who walk in. They’re cops. She knows they’re cops even if she can’t see the blue of their outfits under their long winter jackets.

They moved like cops.

Ace cards her fingers through her hair with one hand, hair which had been dyed platinum blonde to within an inch of its life, and with the other she taps the button on the underside of the desk to send an alert to the Doctor two offices down to let her know there’s ‘trouble’ up front.

“Good evening,” the younger cop says.

He’s cute, Ace thinks, and young.

The guy is probably only a little older than her if that. Mid-twenties and already detective by his outfit which meant one of three things: daddy is on the force and bumped his boy up, he’s fucking someone, or he’s just that good.

Ace’s instincts say it’s the last one. The look in the young detective’s eye is hard, sharp, and clear. Something is driving him and he’s smart, and there’s nothing more dangerous than a smart, driven cop.

“If you say so,” Ace replies drolly. “Can I help you?”

“We’ve got an appointment,” the young cop says. “I’m Detective Shining Armor with Canterlot Ninth Precinct, this is my partner, Detective Sterling Standard, we’re with homicide, there should be a note down about us.”

There is. Ace had seen it that afternoon when she came in and she’d been hoping they wouldn’t show. This place was a rat’s nest on a good day, and cops always made things worse.

“Gimme a minute,” Ace replies with a flavorless smile. “This computer ain’t exactly top of the line.”

Detective Armor’s older partner grunts in annoyance as Ace looks down and starts tapping away at the keyboard. Really, she’s just wasting time, the Doctor actually invests in pretty decent equipment for this place, but if she buys enough time the Doctor might be able to find an excuse to kick these two out.

“Armor… Armor… okay,” Ace says after a few minutes. “Appointment time is here, you’re ten minutes early though.”

“I’m compulsively punctual,” Shining says with a faint grin.

Ace smiles back, and there’s a touch of actual humor in her expression. This boy is dangerous. He’s smart, attractive, has a nice smile and a quick wit… that probably gets him into a lot of places that he has no business being and that’s an even more dangerous skillset for a cop. Ace knew that if she were a little dumber she’d be grinning back at him like an idiot.

Cops shouldn’t be allowed to be that cute.

“Right, well, the Doctor will be with you in a moment,” Ace says finally. “We run on a pretty tight schedule here.”

“So do we,” Sterling grumbled. “Killers don’t though, so if you could maybe hurry’er up, we can get back to doing our fuckin’ job.”

“Relax, Stand,” Armor says over his shoulder. “Let the woman work, okay? We’re public servants, not bullies.”

Good cop, bad cop.

Ace barely keeps a smile down at their antics. They’re good. It probably puts a lot of people at ease, too. These two are like a vaudeville act, too cliche to be real which, ironically, makes them seem more genuine.

They settle in, and Ace sits back in her chair. It’s been a quiet day and she’d been hoping it would stay that way, but with this appointment, Ace got the feeling this wouldn’t be staying that way.

“Mind if I ask you a question?” Shining says as he turns back to her.

“Shoot.”

“How’s the neighborhood here been?” Shining gestures out towards the door. “I mean, you look smart, and given that we’re with homicide you can probably put two-and-two together as to what we’re here about.”

Complimentary and cute. Damn this guy is good.

“I mean, I’m not gonna lie, things have been rough,” Ace says with a shrug. “Pretty much everyone here is scared shitless of the Narc, and the rest have family in the East End where those poor sods are getting beaten to a pulp.”

“Yeah.” Shining lowers his head and for the life of her Ace can’t help but feel a little bad. He looks genuinely upset. “Look, we’re doing our best, but this is… I’m not gonna lie either, the Narc is like Houdini… every time we think we’ve got him we turn up nothing, so we’re doing our best. That’s why I need this appointment to go well, it’s one of the only leads we’ve got right now.”

“That’s a pretty bad sitch,” Ace replies aridly. “So much for Canterlot’s finest.”

“Hey!” Sterling snaps as he storms over to the desk and elbows Shining Armor out of the way. “I don’t see you out there tryin’ to track down a murderin’ psychopath, and if you ask me maybe they’re doin’ this city a favor cleaning up the streets a little.”

“STAND!” Shining Armor snarls, grabbing his partner’s shoulder.

“Will you two please quiet down.”

A gently accented voice echoes from the hall, followed by its owner, and Ace has to struggle not to sigh in relief as the Doctor comes around the corner.

She’s a tall, spare woman with a complexion that’s only a shade or two lighter than her slate-gray hair which is tied up in a neat bun. Her outfit is a functional blouse and long skirt which are covered over by a long white coat, and she pauses at the edge of the reception desk to glare at the pair of detectives through a pair of thin, square-framed glasses.

Sterling turns to face the new arrival with a bellicose scowl on his face.

“You Doctor Nockshovel?”

The Doctor raises a single eyebrow slowly as Ace stands, bristling at the disrespect, but pauses as the Doctor puts a finger out to forestall her.

“Nachschlüssel,” she corrects him dryly, “but if that is too difficult for you, you may call me Doctor Key.”

Detective Armor moves past his partner, putting himself between the older man and the doctor to hold out a hand.

“Doctor Nachschlüssel, my name is Detective Shining Armor, and I apologise for the disturbance,” he says quickly. “We’re not here to cause trouble, we’re just trying to help as best we can, and right now everyone is a little on edge.”

The doctor clicks her tongue, then nods.

“Very well,” she says tersely. “Please leave your weapons at the front desk, they will be kept in a locked container until you leave.”

“I’m not walking into this place unarmed,” Sterling says bluntly.

“Then I’m afraid neither of you are walking in at all,” Nachschlüssel replies. “No weapons of any kind are permitted, not even yours, Officer.”

“And you can’t stop me—us—from doing our goddamn jobs, Doc,” Sterling says.

Doctor Nachschlüssel laughs, and it’s a cold, bitter sound that cracks her face like a sheet of ice.

“You think that do you?” She asks with a false veneer of warmth. “Well let me explain something to you, Mister Standard. Serenity is a government-funded healthcare operation, we follow all of our guidelines and restrictions to the tee.”

Shining Armor takes a silent step back as the Doctor steps forward to square up against his larger partner.

“Furthermore, Captain Westbound in IA is a close and personal friend of mine,” Nachschlüssel continues as she draws out her phone from a pocket, “so much so that I have her on speed dial, and Westie always picks up my calls.

“Now, I know that the big bad bully-boys of the Canterlot PD are used to getting their way but I’m afraid that won’t work here. So unless you want to be the subject of scrutiny for your Internal Affairs unit, you will leave your weapons with the front desk, or else get the fuck out of my clinic.”

Sterling Standard works his jaw several times, but before he can manage to say anything more, Shining turns and puts a hand firmly on his partner’s shoulder.

“Sterling,” he says in a low, deadly voice. “How about you go get us some coffee at that place down the road?”

“You fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” Sterling breathes as he turns his gaze to Shining Armor. “I got seniority on you, kid, you don’t just—”

“Sterling.” Shining Armor’s voice takes on the quality of a rifle-round being chambered, and Sterling Standard freezes at the suddenly deadly look in his young partner’s eye. “Step. Out.”

They trade looks for a long moment, and the whole time Aces Wild watches with badly concealed interest. She’d underestimated the smart cop, which was rare for her. He’s not just smart, he’s cold-blooded. Turning to shoot a glance at Doctor Nachschlüssel, Ace waits for the Doctor to give that barely perceptible nod of hers, the one that will tell Ace that the good Doctor is still in control of the situation. Ace and Nachschlüssel had known each other for years and the Doctor had helped Ace through the worst part of her life. She trusted the Doctor just as Nachschlüssel trusted her.

Nachschlüssel bobs her head faintly before turning back to the pair of arguing officers. Ace knew this would be a bad idea the moment those two actually showed for their appointment. Her only hope now is that they didn't spread that bad mood to the rest of the clients or tonight was going to suck.

“Fine.” Sterling steps back and out of Shining’s grip. “It’s your fuckin’ lead anyway, but I’m telling you… it’s a dead end and a waste’a goddamn time.”

“Then get some coffee and take a break,” Shining says more calmly. “If it’s a waste of time, I’ll make it my time wasted.”

“You do that, Armor.”

Sterling leaves the clinic in a huff, and the moment he does, Shining Armor lets out a breath. Then he turns to the Doctor and gives her an apologetic smile.

“Sorry about that,” he says quietly. “Sterling’s under a lot of pressure right now, we all are… now, can we move on?”

“Your gun?” Nachschlüssel says, nodding to Shining’s underarm holster.

“Right.”

Shining Armor shrugs his coat back and turns to Ace before pulling out a matte black forty caliber pistol, loosing the cartridge, and laying both weapon and cartridge on the desk. Then he reaches to his belt, draws out a smaller nine millimeter, and repeats the process.

“I’ll expect those back,” Shining says before turning away from Ace. “Are we good?”

“I suppose we are,” Nachschlüssel says briskly. “Follow me, Detective."

Shining Armor blows out a silent breath as Sterling finally leaves. He and his partner got along better than some partners in the Canterlot PD, but the reason for their dynamic had nothing to do with friendship. Shining didn't consider Sterling to be a friend, and the feeling is mutual. The reason they work together well isn't that they have a lot in common, but because they know precisely what they don't have in common, and avoid those topics like the plague.

So far it's worked well in their partnership, but these embarrassing little moments crop up more often than they should, and more so lately with all the pressure from the mounting body count.

"Sorry about the noise, Miss Ace," Shining says with a short wave as Doctor Nachschlüssel turns away from the lobby. "Have a good night."

He falls into step behind the Docter, following her down the hall to a locked metal gate that divides the lobby of the clinic from the treatment areas. Doctor Nachschlüssel fits a key to the gate lock, then passes her ID badge across a scanner, and the double-lock mechanism gives out a series of clunks before releasing.

“Please try to keep your distance from any of our clients, Detective Armor,” Nachschlüssel says. “Most of them have poor experiences with law enforcement.”

“Of course,” he replies quietly. “I’m only here to see one of your patients.”

“Clients, Detective Armor,” Doctor Nachschlüssel says, pausing at a door to a side room. “They are clients, not patients. They are not sick or injured, they are merely seeking help in overcoming a problem.”

“Right, sorry,” Shining nods genially. “I’ll remember that.”

“See that you do.”

Doctor Nachschlüssel opens the door and steps inside. The room is larger than it looked from outside, with a single, barred, window, and the walls that are painted a soft, unassuming shade of beige. It’s sparsely furnished, with a couch pushed up against the far wall, a loveseat across from it, and a small table between the two. Behind the loveseat is another table with a single chair.

“You may speak to him there,” Nachschlüssel says, gesturing to the couch and seat arrangement. “Ace will be sitting in to observe and make sure nothing goes wrong, if she feels you’re out of order she will call me in and you will be escorted off of the premises, are we clear, Detective? One strike and you’re out, as they say.”

“One strike,” Shining repeats. “Got it. I promise there won’t be any trouble, Doctor, I just want to speak to him, but given that it’s an ongoing investigation, having a third party in the room…”

“This is not a debate,” Nachschlüssel says. “This is regarding the health and wellness of my resident. My employees are bound by contract to not speak of anything regarding our clients, but if that is not good enough for you then the exit is down the hall.”

“Nope, that’s good enough for me,” Shining says, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “Thank you for giving me this chance.”

Doctor Nachschlüssel eyes Shining carefully for a moment before nodding and turning her back on him.

“Take a seat,” she says over her shoulder, “Ace will be in with him in a moment.”

Shining Armor nods as the Doctor leaves the room, and he walks across the room to the loveseat, pauses, then passes it to take a seat on the couch. Best, he thought, that he not appear to be sitting between the person he wanted to speak to, and the door.

The wait is roughly ten more minutes of silence before the door opens again, and Ace walks into the room, gives Shining Armor a wary look, then glances back through the door toward the hallway.

“If you want to leave, just say so,” Ace says gently. “This isn’t an interrogation—”she says, then looks directly at Armor—“right?”

“Of course not,” Shining says, standing up as Ace steps away from the door.

Twenty-eight years. That’s how old the young man who enters is, but he doesn’t look it. The first thought in Shining’s head is that this is someone to whom life became very harsh, very quickly, because nothing else explains someone looking so worn at so young an age.

“You’re Tuesday Morning, right?” Shining says, forcing an even geniality into his voice. “Previously employed as an assistant manager at the Danse Macabre, prior to its closure?”

Once upon a time, Tuesday might have been attractive. He’s tall and pale with a hollow look to him that, had he been eating right, would have simply looked intimidating; now he looks like death warmed over and then left in the microwave like a forgotten cup of tea. His hair is a drab shade of blue with hints of black near the tips suggesting an old dye job, and his long, lanky arms have the telltale track marks of a user.

“Uhm, y-yeah,” Tuesday mumbles.

His voice has a pleasant basso quality to it that probably made him a lot of friends of the fairer persuasion. That, combined with what once were good looks, only reinforced the notion of a rapid fall to Shining.

“What uhm… what did you want?”

“Well,” Shining begins as he settles back down to the couch, before leaning forward to brace his elbows on his knees, “first off, why don’t you take a seat.”

Tuesday glances at the loveseat, then back at Ace who just nods as she takes her own seat at the little table to wait and watch.

Letting out a quiet sigh, Tuesday walks over to the loveseat and sits down in it, stooping like an enormous crow.

“My name is Detective Shining Armor, and I’m with the Canterlot Ninth Precinct, Homicide Division,” Shining says, carefully keeping his voice modulated to something soft as he draws out his badge and sets it down. “And I wanted to talk to you about a girl named Tallymark.”

The young man’s posture changes the instant the name leave Shining’s lips. His eyes dilate, his body goes tense, and his almost-silent breathing becomes harsh and labored.

“I g-gave my s-statement to the police when they showed up,” Tuesday stammers. “Sh-She overdosed.”

“Yes, that’s what your amended statement, says,” Shining replies cautiously. “However, there is the matter of the one that you originally gave and later recanted and that’s the one I wanted to discuss.”

Tuesday swallows hard, and he wipes his hands on his blank black trousers leaving behind streaks of sweat as he shakes his head.

“I… I was high,” Tuesday says quietly. “I th-thought I saw something, but I d-didn’t, but now I’m here, and I’m clean, and I’ve been clean for months.”

“And I’m here because I think you did see something,” Shining says. “And I think that the other officers on scene convinced you that you hadn’t because it seemed unlikely given the circumstances.”

Rather than looking relieved that someone might believe him, Tuesday instead turns pale.

“Why uhm… why would you think that?” Tuesday asks quietly.

“Because I think,” Shining replies, “that Tallymark might have been the very first murder—or at least the earliest one we have on record—committed by the serial killer that the media is calling ‘The Narc’.”

Tuesday’s hands start to shake and his breathing grows rapid and unsteady. He busies himself by running his quaking fingers through greasy strands of hair, turns his eyes away from the police officer in front of him, and his gaze darts around the room, from the wall behind Shining, vapid paintings hung over them, before finally settling on the window that looks out over the narrow alley between Serenity and a small strip mall.

His hands still. Whatever Tuesday sees out there changes the young man. His breathing steadies as he turns woodenly back to face Shining Armor. The difference is stark. One moment, Tuesday was about to bolt, and now he's almost stable.

“I uhm… I didn’t see anything,” Tuesday says more steadily. “I was high, we all were, and she OD’d, and we didn’t realise it until it was too late, so I called nine-one-one, and they tried to bring her back, but she was already too far gone.”

Shining narrows his eyes at Tuesday, then turns to look at the alleyway window. Nothing. Just the blank window, the dark of the night, and the faint suggestion of old masonry so common to the older parts of Canterlot. He saw something. That was certain, but what? Possibly nothing, but his gut says that's bull.

Fine, the nuclear option it is, then.

Turning back to Tuesday, Shining reaches into his pocket and draws out a folded piece of paper which he takes his time unfolding until the creased page is held up in his hand like a battered flag.

Then Shining Armor clears his throat and starts to speak.

“I was with Tally and Greased Wheels and we were doing some molly when all of a sudden this fog fills the room, and then Tally starts screaming, and Grease is screaming, and I heard someone laughing—”

“—wait that’s—”

“—and talking, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. It’s like the fog made everything sound far away, and all the while Tally was screaming—”

“—please stop—”

“—and then there was this wet sound, and it made my stomach turn, and the laughter changed, and got sick-sounding—”

“—STOP IT PLEASE!”

“That’s enough!”

Aces Wild storms across the room and rips the page from Shining’s hand, throws it on the ground, then turns to Tuesday who’s curled up in the fetal position, shaking and crying and begging.

“Are you fuckin’ insane?” Ace snarls. “He asked you to fuckin’ stop.”

“I’m sorry,” Shining replies, and for all the world he genuinely did mean it, “but I’ve got people dying left and right out there, I have to do what I have to do.”

“Yeah well, so do I,” Ace says. “Now get the fuck out.”

Shining Armor sighs, then stoops to pick up the paper, stands, and moves around the fuming form of Ace, pausing only to look down at Tuesday who is still cowering in the loveseat and looking utterly wretched.

“I am sorry,” Shining says quietly. “But I will do whatever it takes to catch these killers, and I hope you understand that.”

With that, Shining turns his back on the pair, the angry CNA and her sobbing client, and makes his way out of the room.

Out in the hallway of Serenity of Canterlot, Doctor Nachschlüssel had been listening, and nothing about that conversation had been particularly endearing, so when Shining Armor emerged it was to find her with her arms crossed over her chest and a deep scowl on her face.

“I misjudged you, Detective Armor,” she says sharply. “I thought you someone with a soul… my mistake.”

Shining blows out a slow breath and shakes his head.

“Please understand that I respect everything you do here, Doctor, but…” Shining pauses, then grimaces and nods to a door. “Do you have an office we can speak in? I’ll be brief.”

The answer she wants to give is a sharp no, but the look on the Detective’s face is one that Doctor Nachschlüssel hasn’t seen often, even in her long and occasionally unpleasant career. It’s the face of someone who has seen a great deal of very bad death. The kind of death that comes back to you at three in the morning after a night of restless sleep, and wakes you up with two fists gripping your lungs and a knife in your belly.

“Fine.”

“Thank you.”

Doctor Nachschlüssel leads the Detective not towards the lobby but deeper into the clinic, through a small recreational area, and into an office that Shining Armor could best describe as quite neatly cluttered.

Everything is everywhere; papers, pencils, pens, and folders, and yet it’s all in places where Shining imagines he could easily locate it, and he has no doubt that the good Doctor knows where each and every file and paperclip is in this room.

“Take a seat,” Nachschlüssel says, gesturing to one of the two chairs in the room, which has a large stack of manila folders on it.

Nodding, Shining scoops them up and deposits them carefully at the foot of the chair, then sits, as Doctor Nachschlüssel takes a seat across from him.

“Tell me why you’re so insistent on speaking to Mister Morning, Detective,” Nachschlüssel says curtly.

Shining Armor takes a deep breath and nods.

“In the past several months, Canterlot has seen a rash of murders the likes of which no crime analyst in the nation can account for,” Shining begins. “We’re not sure where it started, but the one I’m assigned to currently is the Narc. A serial killer who targets people involved in the drug trade.

“Your Mister Morning witnessed something in early January, and according to all official documents, what that ‘thing’ was, was his friend Tallymark overdosing on some bad molly, crashing, being taken by the ambulance crews a while later, and being pronounced DOA by the attending Doctor.”

“All official documents?” Nachschlüssel repeats. “And… unofficial ones?”

Shining nods and lays the paper he’d been reading from earlier flat on the desk before pushing it towards the Doctor.

“This,” he says, “is the original statement given by one Tuesday Morning when his friend was picked up, and it differs… considerably from the one in the files. Officially, it’s recanted, so it’s inadmissible as evidence, which is why it took me months to even come across it.”

Doctor Nachschlüssel pins the paper to the desk with one finger, then drags it toward her and looks it over, skimming it quickly.

“You’ll forgive me if I say this reads like…” Nachschlüssel trails off as she waves a hand around before settling on: “like a bad trip.”

“I know,” Shining says. “Trust me, I get why the original crew looked it over and asked him to think a little harder, but there was more to it… the body had some odd qualities we hadn’t learned yet.”

“Such as?”

Shining folds his hands in front of his face, her brow creasing as he takes a few more breaths.

“It’s not uncommon for EMT’s to administer epinephrine to a patient suffering overdose,” he says slowly. “That was what everyone assumed had happened when the Doctor’s found a needle mark in the chest upon autopsy. But the blood work didn’t support that, neither did the EMT reports, but by the time anyone— that is me—put that information together, six months had passed and the body was beyond any use.”

Shining hangs his head over the Doctor’s desk as he leans against it.

“No one questioned it, because there was no investigation at the time,” Shining says through grit teeth. “It was open-and-shut, a junkie OD’s, toe-tag and bag’er and that was it, and we missed what I think was the Narc’s very first murder.”

“How do you account for the fog?” Nachschlüssel asks. “It sounds like a hallucinogenic haze or something similar.”

“They were in a nightclub!” Shining says. “How easy would it be to turn one of those fog machines toward a small room and fill it in? A bunch of stoners in a room filled with smoke? They probably walked right in, murdered Tallymark, and strolled out!”

Nachschlüssel runs a hand over her face and up across her neatly kept hair, then sighs and shakes her head.

“It sounds good, but it’s a lot of supposition,” she says finally.

“Which is almost word-for-word what my captain said,” Shining admits. “But I have a gut feeling that this is the right track… the needle mark is the clincher. There was no EMT documentation of using epinephrine, there was no unusual levels of it in her bloodwork either, but there are documents referencing the puncture in both the ED reports and the autopsy reports, and that’s the Narc’s MO!”

“I thought the Narc targeted people on the profit side of the drug trade,” Nachschlüssel says, “not buyers.”

“Tallymark wasn’t just a user,” Shining says. “She was a pusher. She had bags of the stuff, all marked for sale… if she hadn’t been dead she’d have been up on better than a dozen charges of Possession with Intent.”

As a Psychiatric Doctor, Nachschlüssel could count on one hand the number of times she had encountered this kind of blatant honesty. Shining Armor is driven, intelligent, and absolutely certain, which can be dangerous, but in this instance, Nachschlüssel’s own mind put the pieces together the same way that Shining Armor had.

Yes, there are a few holes in the story, but not in the logic.

The logic is sound.

That’s the worst part.

The logic is sound.

“This would mean that Tuesday is lying,” she says quietly.

“And I need to know why,” Shining Armor replies. “I need to know why he would lie to protect a murderer… so even though I know I’m asking you to violate your oaths, I’m asking anyway…” he reaches out and puts a hand over Nachschlüssel’s, and grips tight. “Please… tell me everything you know about your client, Tuesday Morning.”

Doctor Nachschlüssel sighs, then reclaims her hand, reaches over to her phone, and presses a button.

“Ace, hold my calls, I’m going to be in a meeting for a while.”

Down the road from Serenity of Canterlot, Detective Sterling Standard is nursing a cup of coffee in the front seat of the police cruiser he and Shining had arrived in earlier that evening. It’s his fifth cup in two hours, and he’s starting to get angry. Shining Armor is a good kid, he knows that, but it’s galling that he got promoted out of nowhere after only a few years on the force.

It took Sterling better than twice as long to get the same recognition and this kid got it while he was still wet behind the ears!

Of course, that anger would be easier to hold on to if Shining weren’t so damn good at his job.

Tipping his cup back, Sterling swallows the last of the coffee, then grumbles as his bladder makes it clear in no uncertain terms that he needs to find a bathroom, and quick.

“Too much fuckin’ coffee,” Sterling mumbles as he steps out of the cruiser and onto the sidewalk.

It’s freezing outside, the dead of winter, and Sterling shivers. He wants to move south where it’s warmer. Retire on a beach or something, maybe.

That’s what he’s thinking of when it happens.

A beach in the sun.

It starts with a thud from across the street, and Sterling, lost in his daydream, ignores it. He ignores the sound until it gets louder. Harsh breathing, pounding feet, and suddenly he’s surrounded by Fog.

“What the f—”

It’s the last thing he manages to get out before an impact like a Mack Truck slams into him out of nowhere. Stars explode across his vision as something heavy and metallic cracks so hard across his skull he tastes metal and feels something break.

A grip like steel closes around his throat and something strong enough to haul a two-hundred-and-seventy pound man in body armor with a single arm drags him into the alley between Serenity of Canterlot and the block of business nearby.

“Detective Sterling Standard.”

The voice is raw and wet like someone just finished screaming their way through an entire rock album before speaking, and every syllable is punctuated with a nasty snapping noise like splintering bone.

“W-Wha—?”

“You’re poisoning this city,” it says as it throws him to the ground.

Sterling’s senses are spinning, but he manages to orient himself just enough to look up from where he’s lying bloody and dazed on the filth-encrusted concrete ground of the alleyway.

The thing standing over him could never be confused for human. It’s hunched over and wearing a large, mantled coat of old brown leather over its misshapen body. A hideous, scoliotic hunch turns its back into a twisted caricature terminating in a hood over a face that has a lambent gold glow to it.

Thick leather gloves cover a hand with too many fingers that grips a metal-tipped cane stained red with blood. Sterling vaguely recognises the blood as his.

Vertigo assaults Sterling’s senses as he tries to stand. Something is wrong. Something is busted. A cracked skull… maybe worse.

“Don’t get up on my account,” the thing hisses as it crosses the distance faster than Sterling can process and plants a heavy boot against his chest, driving him to the ground.

For the first time, Sterling gets a look at the thing’s face, and all he can think of is how very much he wishes he hadn’t.

It’s dead.

It should be dead.

Ragged strands of multi-coloured hair hang over hollow eyes that are lit from within by a sickly golden glow, and its jaw hangs broken, lolling from its face. Teeth of different sizes and shapes, fangs and molars in all the wrong places, sprout from noxious gums while some kind of viscous fluid the same shade as the glow that lights it from the inside drips from its shattered maw.

“Scream if you can,” it hisses. “The Fog swallows all of that noise… just like all of those drugs you stole from the evidence locker swallowed so many people on the streets, Sterling Standard.”

It was one time, Sterling thought.

Just one time!

He wasn’t a betting man. He never went to casinos or anything like that, but once, just once, two months back, he’d been at a big wrestling match and bet his whole paycheck on the guy he thought was a sure thing.

Turns out he wasn’t.

Sterling had lost big, and rent was coming up. Rent, bills, car payments… but he knew a few characters on the streets through some buddies in Vice and…

“It was only once,” Sterling sobs.

His attacker’s shattered face twists into a hideous mockery of a smile as they dip their malformed hand into the pouch at their side and draw out a single metal syringe with an empty chamber.

“Once is enough.”

Outside of the alleyway, no one heard Sterling Standard’s final screams.

The Fog swallows those sorts of things.

As the Fog fades in the alley below, Tuesday Morning settles into his bed on the fourth floor of Serenity of Canterlot and tries to stop shaking.

That cop knows, he has to know. He was asking too many of the right questions. Or wrong ones, as the case may be. He was asking questions that Tuesday couldn’t answer, not with giving everything away.

Not without—

Tuesday shifts in his bed and it creaks loudly, as it usually does, but this time instead of the normal noise, the creak echoes. It echoes far more than it should in such a small room, and the sound puts a cube of ice down Tuesday’s spine.

“I didn’t say anything,” Tuesday mumbles quietly as he puts his back to the room and buries his face in the pillow. “I promise… I didn’t say anything.”

“I know.” The voice is a wet, crackling hiss that snaps, twists, and then softens to something human. “You’d never sell me out like that, right Tuesday?”

Tuesday swallows back a quiet sob as he rolls over.

His room isn’t heavily furnished, none of the rooms in Serenity are, but he has a bed, a nightstand, a chest of drawers, and a desk with a single chair.

In that chair is a human figure in a heavy brown mantled coat with the hood pulled up over her face. Her gloved hand is gripping the haft of a cane, and even though he can’t see her face, he knows that she’s smiling.

She’s always smiling.

“You’re one of the good ones, Tuesday,” she says brightly. “Just keep on being good, and we’re all awesome, alright?”

“Y-Yeah,” Tuesday stammers. “A-Awesome.”

“Cool, well, I just wanted to check up on ya,” she says as she stands up. “That Armor guy was really giving you the third degree, huh? Don’t sweat it though… he’s a good guy too,” she gestures out and down towards the lower level. “Even if he’s trying to stop me, I know it’s nothing personal. He’s a cop, and I’m… well, it’s the principle of the thing, y’know?”

“I know,” Tuesday says as he swallows hard. “P-Principles are important.”

“Dead right,” she says.

Then she laughs, and it’s haunting for how absolutely normal it sounds. That’s the worst part, in Tuesday’s opinion. When she laughs, she sounds completely normal, and not at all like a monster out of someone’s worst nightmare.

“Anyway, keeping talking to the new admits here, okay?” She’s smiling under that hood as she puts a hand on the pouch at her waist. “Get me a few more marks, but no rush. Take a day or two, and I’ll be back to talk.”

“Sure thing,” Tuesday promises. “I’ll talk to everyone.”

“Good man! Employee of the month!” she says as she starts jogging in place in a fashion that would be comical if it were anyone but her. “Anyways, gotta go! Got a hot date, y’know? Seeya!”

And with that, she backs up, turns, and steps into… nothing.

She’s just gone.

Tuesday rolls back over in his creaky bed and closes his eyes, and as he does he finds himself seriously wishing he’d just taken up his mom’s offer years ago to be a CPA.

Leather boots strike curling vinyl tile as the murderer the police call the ‘Narc’ emerges from the Fog into the disused closet on the fifth of a certain apartment building and casually elbows the door open, and as she does the mantled coat and brown gloves fade away into Fog, and the pouch at her hip and the cane in her hand go with it.

Rainbow Dash steps out into her building and kicks the door shut, then heads down the hall toward the door at the far end with a skip in her step. The door is marked five-nine-five, and the white paint covering it is chipped. The water pressure is pretty bad too, making showers pretty disappointing, and half the time at least one part of the washer and dryer combo in the apartment isn’t working.

Best place she’s ever lived, in Rainbow’s opinion.

Fitting her key to the door, Rainbow pushes it open and steps inside. It’s faintly humid, and the scent of shampoo is in the air. She’s in the shower, then, and that puts a smile on Rainbow’s face.

It’s always best when she’s right out of the shower and all warm and flushed.

Pulling her hoodie off, Rainbow hangs it from the rack by the door, then kicks off her converse, and stretches, savoring the cracks and pops of her spine as she makes her way into the bedroom.

“Welcome back.”

“Holy shit!”

Rainbow stumbles back and jerks her hand out, and the cane snaps into existence in her grip.

Sitting on the bed is a shape cut from blackest shadow with a face like bone and hollow eyes stretched into an endless scream. It’s a mask. Rainbow recognises that after a moment, but her heart is still hammering in her chest.

As it stands, it rolls its shoulders, and a faint pulse of Fog the color of shadows spills off of them briefly, shrouding them.

“Father sends his best wishes, sister.” The voice is female, where it isn’t muffled by the mask that’s twisted into that face of a screaming ghost. “How goes the harvest?”

“The… oh!” Rainbow relaxes back and settles her cane on the ground before glancing back towards the bathroom before turning to look back at the Ghost. “Look… can we do this like, not here? Flutters isn’t involved and I don’t shit where I eat, y’know?”

The Ghost cocks its head curiously, then nods.

“Fine,” she says after a moment. “The bridge between Whitetail and the Commons. I’m there most nights.”

“Why?” Rainbow asks. “It’s kind of a shitty bridge.”

“I know,” she replies as she puts a hand to her face and pulls it loose, drawing it down to show a startlingly average, freckled face with a green complexion, and curls of messy green hair beneath her hood. “But I like it anyway… lonely places like that are just nice. My name is Wallflower, by the way.”

“Rainbow Dash, and suit yourself, I guess,” Rainbow says with a shrug. “Now, uh… can you scram? I’m about to get… y’know, busy.”

The Ghost frowns, then rolls her eyes and sighs.

“Father is dying, you know,” Wallflower says bitterly.

“Yeah well,” Rainbow shrugs again. “The old man isn’t gonna croak tonight, right? So beat it.”

Wallflower mutters under her breath as she fits her mask back on, then turns as she draws out a sharp, single-edged blade and draws it through the air like she’s cutting a throat. Where it slices, Fog falls from its edge, and a moment later the Ghost is gone.

“Finally,” Rainbow mutters as she banishes her cane.

“Rainbow?” Fluttershy’s voice echoes out from the bathroom as the water shuts off. “Is that you?”

A smile finds its way onto Rainbow Dash’s face as Fluttershy steps out, her pink hair plastered to her face and bare shoulders, and a towel wrapped around her body.

“Hey, beautiful,” Rainbow says as warmth wells up in her chest. “Looking good.”

“Rainbow, I just showered,” Fluttershy says quietly, wrapping her arms around herself.

“And I—” Rainbow replies as she steps closer and puts her arms around Fluttershy, slipping hands beneath the towel—“do not care.”

1.12

This is probably the worst-case scenario.

“But… you died.”

I swallow back my gorge and force a smile onto my face as a girl with mossy green hair turns to face me. Surprisingly, there’s more confusion on her face than anything else.

“I uh, yeah,” I say quietly. “Well, I got better.”

No matter how I wrack my brain, though, I can’t recall this girl’s face. She says we went to CHS together, and she knows my real name which definitely supports that statement, but if we did then…

“You don’t remember me, huh?” She says with a wan smile.

“I… no,” I reply, forcing a weak laugh. “Sorry… no, I don’t.”

“That’s okay, nobody does,” she says, still smiling. “I never really did anything, and I didn’t have any friends, no clubs or uhm, or anything like that.”

I wring my hands as I try to relax. This isn’t how I imagined I’d get caught having a heartbeat when I was supposed to be two years in the ground, although I can’t say it’s… necessarily bad.

Could be going worse.

“You don’t seem surprised,” I say after a moment. “That I’m not actually dead, I mean.”

She shrugs and turns away from me to lean against the rails and look down at the flow of the River Canter. It gives me time to appreciate that she’s pretty. Not beautiful, not precisely, but pretty in a very normal fashion that’s appealing specifically because it doesn’t stand out. She’s the kind of pretty that you can never grow numb to, I think.

“Sometimes you do what you have to,” she says softly. “Sometimes you just need to get away.”

I watch her as she stares down at the water. If I had to guess, I’d say we were the same age. Probably almost exactly, if we went to school together. She didn’t look young enough to still be in classes, and she definitely didn’t look older than me.

“Were we in the same year?” I ask.

“Mhm.”

“What’s your name?”

She looks up at me and away from the running river, and the moment her eyes settle on me a chill washes down my back. There’s something about her eyes that’s piercing. Despite the soft, oaky brown color, there’s something in the nature of her gaze that cuts right through me.

It only lasts a second though.

“Wallflower,” she says softly. “My name is Wallflower Blush.”

“Pretty name for a pretty girl,” I say with a smile.

To my surprise, she really does blush, and her eyes widen in the first look of surprise she’s worn since I stepped out of the Fog next to her by accident.

My smile starts to fade a moment later as memories of last night slip back into my mind. Memories of shouts and arguments, and of a fight that got physical in the worst possible way.

What am I doing?

Flirting?

I’m a monster. Moreover, I’m a monster with a girlfriend. I mean, yeah, things aren’t exactly going swimmingly between Tempest and me but that’s on me not her! She’s been trying to talk to me, trying to connect, and I just keep pushing her away, and now here I am standing on a bridge next to a girl I’ve known for all of ten minutes, and I’m flirting?

Written's Quill, I am such an asshole.

“Sorry,” I say, taking a step back. “That was uh… kinda lame, sorry.”

Wallflower shakes her head, then gives me a faint smile back.

“No uhm, it’s okay, I’m just…” she trails off with a silent shrug.

“You’re what?”

Her expression fades to something almost forcefully neutral as she turns back to the railing and the river and wraps her arms around herself. Her grip tightens over her forearms as she swallows visibly, and she shakes her head again.

“I’m not.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“Not what?”

“Pretty,” she replies quietly. “I’m ugly. Everything in this world is ugly.”

“Harsh,” I say with a chuckle. “I mean, I think I’m pretty good looking, but I’m kind of a vain bitch so take that for what it’s worth.”

A cute snort escapes Wallflower as she turns to look at me, a confused smile back on her face, and against my better judgment I find myself returning the smile.

“So uhm, can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“Why did you come back?”

A damn good question. I turn away and lean my back against the railing to look up at the cloudy sky as I consider my answer. Reasonably speaking, I could have gone anywhere after I freed Timber and myself from the Old Stain’s dimension. I didn’t have to stick around to try and solve this glorified murder mystery.

“I have friends,” I say after a moment. “People I care about, and who care about me, I guess, who are still here.”

“Must be nice.”

I turn to look over at her. She’s still leaning against the rail and staring down at the water. She doesn’t look angry or sad or upset. Wallflower, if anything, looks resigned. The expression bothers me more than it probably should. She’s cute, but I’m still taken, and even with that aside—even if Tempest and I weren’t an item—she’s human. According to Redheart and Aria, I may look the part but it’s all superficial.

Still, it’s strangely comfortable being around her. The buzzing in the back of my head is quiet for once. Everything about Wallflower is so deeply unobtrusive and inoffensive that it’s hard to focus on her, which is probably why I missed her when I cut through the Wall to take a breath of fresh air. Maybe that same nature makes her easier to be around than others

“Still no friends, then?” I ask, and she shakes her head.

Straightening out, I link my fingers and stretch my arms over my head, sighing aloud as I pop my shoulders and elbows, then relax and hold out a hand.

“Want one?”

Wallflower stares at me like I’ve grown a second head, her gaze alternating between my face and my outstretched hand. I wonder how much of her life must have been pain for even this simple of a gesture to provoke suspicion. It’s a shame because she seems like a nice person. But then again, nobody really gets what they deserve in this world; good, bad, nice, mean, it never seems to matter.

She’s right.

It’s an ugly world.

Slowly, Wallflower reaches out and meets me. Her hand is small and warm in mine, and I grip it firmly.

“You’re nothing like I thought you’d be,” Wallflower says as she shakes my hand.

“I live to surprise,” I say, chuckling.

Before I say anything more, my phone rings. I frown as I let go of Wallflower’s hand a little reluctantly, and pluck my cell from my pocket.

Aria’s name is up on the Caller ID, and I grimace. I can’t avoid them forever I guess, and I’m sure she’s heard about the fiasco over at the apartment by now. Probably she’s going to chew me out and then make me go apologise to Tempest which, frankly, is what I should already be doing.

“Sorry,” I say as I tap the Accept button.

//Finally! There you are!// Aria sounds pissed, but that’s not new.

“Yeah, I know, I know, I’m coming back, I just needed some space,” I say quietly as I turn away from Wallflower.

//Not yet you’re not,// Aria says tersely. //You need to get to the morgue of Canterlot General ASAP, we’ve got another Narc kill.//

“Great.” I hang my head and cuss softly under my breath. Here I am feeling sorry for myself and there are still things out there murdering people. “We don’t know if they’re—” I cut myself off as I glance back over my shoulder at Wallflower “—...y’know, one of the real ones.”

//And we don't know that they're not, besides, this one is a much bigger deal.//

“Why?”

Aria’s sigh ripples static over the line.

//Because the vic is a cop, Red.//

Shit.

That’s bad on a variety of fronts. A bunch of dead pushers and dealers is one thing, but a dead cop is going to put every single precinct on high alert like nothing else. Not only that, but if the Narc is keeping to his MO, and right now there’s no reason to assume he’s not, then that means the dead cop was dealing, or at least dipping a toe into a pool he should’ve been staying well away from.

Things are going to get loud.

“I’m on my way.”

//Stay safe, Red. Love you.//

“Yeah, you too,” I say quietly before hanging up and turning back to Wallflower.

“Sorry, duty calls,” I say gesturing with my phone. “But… you wanna hang out sometime?”

Wallflower smiles faintly and nods.

“I’m here a lot,” she says. “I like it here.”

“Okay, well,” I look around at the bridge. I can’t say why but this place is surprisingly comfortable, “maybe tomorrow night?”

“Sure.”

I smile at her. In my vainer moments, when I’m Sunset Shimmer and not the Nightmare, I like to think that my smile is my best feature. It’s the smile of a con about to pull the biggest scam of all. It’s a smile that doesn’t give half a damn what anyone thinks.

Wallflower’s cheeks color as I reach out suddenly and give her button nose a small poke.

“Tomorrow night,” I repeat. “See you then, Pretty Girl.”

I put my back to her and start walking, and as I do I breathe deep of the Dreamtime air and draw the Fog in closer. It’s dark, and half the lights don’t work, so I walk and walk til I’m out of sight, then I let the Fog swallow me whole as I unsheathe the blades in my fingers and cut my way out of the false skin of Sunset Shimmer, and a moment later Canterlot City has one more Nightmare.

The Dreamtime of Canterlot General is a buzzing hive of activity. No matter the hour, there are always minds sleeping to the toneless hum of anesthesia and filling the Fog with sludgy thoughts. Beyond that, there are the exhausted workers, which are almost as good. Those burnt-out nurses and doctors on their second or third twelve-hour shift, and orderlies who haven’t slept all day; their minds fill the Dreamtime with starbursts of slumber making it hard to focus.

All it would take is the smallest effort of will to put half the hospital to sleep.

That wouldn’t be particularly helpful, though, so I ignore them as best as I can and make my way invisibly into the lower levels.

On the second sublevel of Canterlot General Hospital is the morgue. It’s the largest one in the city but by no means the only one. It is, however, the one contracted for use by public services throughout the city, meaning that if a public servant comes down with a bad case of deceased, then they pretty much always end up here.

I descend the steps toward the morgue, weaving between the sparse night crew until I reach the t-section where the security station vets anyone going in or out. I pass the single rent-a-cop who, I note with a faint grin, is sleeping on duty.

Flicking my fingers against one another, I send a rasp of blades into his mind and he jerks awake from the throes of a sudden, sharp spike of adrenaline carried on the rasp of a euphoric chuckle.

I love being me.

Down the hall, I can feel the familiar mind of Aria and, surprisingly, my other sisters. That must have taken some serious doing to get her down here.

The closed door is no barrier to me, nothing not reinforced by the Fog can hedge me out and even that would take some work. I pass through it, drawn to the minds of my loved ones, and step into the room labeled Morgue Exam Room One.

Adagio stiffens slightly as I pass into the room, and turns her head toward the door. It’s been a while since I’ve seen her out of her Huntress aspect, but she looks good. She looks settled and calm, happy even. Timber treats her well, I know, and she gets along famously with his sister Gloria.

I know when she arrived at their little campground it was on the verge of going under, but a few discreet investments put paid to that, not only securing the site’s future but providing a conveniently distant homestead far away from the temptation of indulging her Killer instincts.

“Little sister," she murmurs.

Aria looks up at her sister with a raised eyebrow, then looks around.

“Is she finally here?”

“She’s here.”

The third voice is thin and reedy and issues from the frail figure occupying a wheelchair beside Aria's seat. I don’t visit my youngest ‘sister’ nearly as much as I ought to but, in my defense, Sonata Dusk is so rarely awake.

I reach out and plunge my finger blades into the skin of reality and wrench downward, cutting away at the Wall of Sleep and briefly joining the Dreamtime and the Real as I pass between the two.

Aria and Adagio both bristle the moment I fade into existence. My body, my real body, is unsettling to anyone rational and, against all odds all three of my sisters are pretty rational, even Sonata.

I’m the weird one.

“Evening, ladies,” I say with a grin that bares my full inhuman dentition.

The only one who doesn’t tense reflexively is Sonata, who smiles weakly at me.

“Hey Sunny,” she says, her voice a breathless whisper. “Long time no see.”

I can’t help but smile back at Sonata. Something about her takes the hate out of me, and although it takes a feat of will, I force the Nightmare back into the recesses of my soul. The long, ragged black coat recedes back to a studded leather jacket as my blades fold back into my fingers, and my skin softens from squamous red to a fair shade of amber.

“Hey, Red,” Aria says as she gets up from her seat and opens her arms. “C’mere.”

Sighing quietly, I move in and take the offered hug. Aria wraps her arms around me, and a moment later Adagio is there too, pulling me close and nestling against my hair.

“Are you alright, dear?” Adagio asks gently.

She’s taller now, a reflection of her Huntress aspect, but also because there’s more meat on her. She’s taken up woodworking out on the borders of the Everfree in her spare time.

To keep herself busy, she says.

“Not really,” I reply. “But that’s not why we’re here.” I draw back and share a smile with the two Sirens. “But it is really good to see you—” I look down at Sonata who’s still smiling up at me—“all of you.”

I let go of Aria and Adagio and turn to Sonata to kneel down to her and pull her gently into my arms. She’s so thin and so frail. It feels like I’m hugging someone’s ninety-year-old grandmother, although in fairness Sonata is orders of magnitude older than that.

“Hey, ‘Nata,” I say into the wan strands of her arctic blue hair. “I’ve missed you a lot.”

“Missed you too, Sunny,” Sonata says softly. “Things have been getting rough, huh?”

“Yeah,” I say, pulling away and brushing some hair from Sonata’s weary eyes as I do. “But that’s no excuse. I should be up there on MedSurg visiting a little more often.”

Aria and Adagio’s hands come to rest on either of my shoulders and, for a moment, I just close my eyes and let myself soak in the affection from the three of them. My one-time enemies, my once-more allies.

My beloved sisters.

“Oh, before I forget,” Aria mutters as she digs into her pockets and pulls out the few pieces of my disguise I can’t bring with me through the Dream.

A small travel makeup kit and a set of cosmetic lenses in their container are pressed into my hands and I step over to the mirror closest to me to start putting on my face.

“So uh, not that it’s not great to see you, ‘Nata,” I say as I poke myself in the eyeball, “but—ow—what are you doing out of bed?”

“Something broke through the Wall of Sleep from the dark place…” Sonata replies weakly.

I freeze in the process of applying my foundation.

“What?”

The word comes out an oath.

“I don’t know when it happened,” Sonata says, “time is funny in the high spaces, but I felt it when the Wall buckled. The Entity forced one of his children through, I think.”

Adagio shakes her head, sending her wild orange poof dancing.

“That’s next to impossible, sister… I doubt any of them could even survive the transition between there—” Adagio gestures broadly outward—“and here! There’s barely anything of the Real left in them!”

“Unless they’re newborn,” Aria says quietly.

I put on the last layer of foundation, changing my face enough to make myself passably unrecognisable as ‘Sunset Shimmer’, and Aria holds out a white coat with a name tag attached that I swap for my black leather.

Scarlet Dream, on duty.

“A newborn Killer could probably survive,” I confirm. “Us four are freaks of nature… you three are older than dirt and have enough native magic to give you a foothold in both worlds, and I cheated like fuck when the Old Stain made me in the first place, so we’re holding together, but one of my older siblings would fall into the Fog the moment they stepped into the Real.”

A fresh-from-the-grave Killer might be able to swing it though, like Aria said. One who was new enough… young enough… and strong enough.

They’d need a lot of hate in them for that though.

A lot of bad memories.

“Okay, that’s…” I start, then trail off as a new train of thought docks in my mental station. “That… may not be such a bad thing.”

All three of my sisters turn to look incredulously in my direction.

“Now hear me out!” I say, holding up a hand. “If the Old Stain sent someone here after this long, it’s probably not for us, okay? If he was that set on taking us out then he’d have gone after you three way before he took a metaphysical shiv to the kidneys.”

“Which means he’s after the Thief,” Aria fills in.

“Yahtzee.” I grin as I look between my sisters, all of whom look to be different levels of worried.

“This is getting bad, Sunnybuns,” Sonata says softly. “The Wall is getting all torn up by the Fog… the Killers… too much of what belongs over there is over here.”

I sigh quietly and nod.

“I know,” I say, kneeling again and putting a hand over Sonata’s slender fingers. “But maybe this time we can make it go wrong in our favor.”

“Only you would be that brazen, Shimmer,” Adagio says dryly.

“Regardless!” Aria says, stepping between us. “We’re here for a reason, and that reason is that this poor bastard—” she gestures at a closed mortuary cabinet— “got got by the Narc, and it’s the freshest thing we’ve had off that toolbag all year since most of his victims are found after several hours of decay spent pickling in a cocktail of street drugs.”

“Hear, hear,” I say flatly as I step past her, grip the handle of the cabinet, and roll out of the slab.

“Everyone,” Aria says, turning to the corpse, “meet the late Detective Sterling Standard of the Canterlot Ninth Precinct, Homicide Division.”

I whistle softly at the damage.

He might’ve been a dirty cop, but whoever did this probably sent him to the Summerlands because they definitely beat the devil out of him. I pull on a pair of plastic gloves and start looking around the body.

“Fractured skull… shattered clavicle…” I say as I look over the damage. “Broken arms, broken jaw… wow, somebody had a serious grudge.”

“All standard Narc MO, though,” Aria says as she gloves up and digs in. “Including the pièce de résistance… this bad boy.”

She brushes away puts two fingers to the skin of the portly corpse’s chest and pulls, revealing a track mark right over the man’s heart.

“Right… Sonata?” I look pointedly at my younger sister.

Aria takes a grip on the handles of Sonata’s and wheels her close to the table where the body which once owned the name Sterling Standard lay. Even the smallest movement costs her, but Sonata weathers the strain as she raises an arm and lays a hand over the older man’s chest where the puncture mark pierced his flesh.

Sonata Dusk takes a deep breath in, and when she lets it out the air releases in a choked and rattling stridor. Her eyes open to reveal dead white cataracts as the shadow of a bruise forms in a ring around her neck. Her fingers curl into an arthritic claw as she moves her hand up Sterling’s body, over the ribs to the throat, and up until her palm is hovering just over his mouth.

“This part always squicks me out,” Aria mumbles.

“Didn’t you once get run through with a chainsaw?” I ask, earning a shrug from her.

Adagio swats us both gently over the head.

“Shut up you two.”

Sterling Standard twitches briefly, then jerks, then his lips part and…

…and nothing.

“Uh… seconds try’s the charm?” I ask, looking to Sonata.

She comes out of her trance slowly, and as she does the bruise on her neck fades, and her breathing takes on a stronger, healthier quality.

Well, healthy for Sonata, anyway.

“It’s gone,” she says quietly. “There’s not enough left.”

“Not enough what?” I ask, looking down at the body.

“Memory… soul… Fog…” Sonata replies as she stares at her hand in disbelief. “It’s already gone. Someone took it.”

“How is that possible?!” Adagio stands and storms between us to bend over the body. “Move!”

I scramble out of the way and Aria pulls Sonata back at the same time as Adagio puts a hand to her waist, tightens her grip, and where there had been nothing a moment ago, Adagio is now pulling a half-mask in the shape of a hare’s face free from a set of old leather straps that had been securing it to her belt, and fitting it over her face.

“Hey! Is that safe?!” I say sharply, looking around. “Where’s the coroner?!”

“Eighth row, third from the bottom,” Aria says, jerking a thumb towards the cabinets, “we’re gonna need you to squidge up his memories a bit, by the way, but I dosed him with Propofol so he’ll be out for a while.”

“Shut up,” Adagio hisses.

Her voice comes out taxed and raw, with an odd hiccup between the words, and a moment later she gives in and a soft, strange lullaby begins spilling from between her lips as she leans close to the body and takes a long, heavy breath.

“Stainless steel and old brick mortar,” she says as she breathes out between tones of her song, then takes another deep breath. “Something else… something… gold.”

“Like the metal?” I ask.

“A liquid,” Adagio clarifies as she straightens and rips the mask from her face, and the lullaby abruptly cuts off. “But the smell is… gold, and viscous, I can’t really describe it any better, dear, I’m sorry.”

“A suspension, maybe,” Aria says. “What if what you’re smelling is a way to suspend and capture the Fog in a physical form?”

“Is that possible?” I look over Adagio and Aria, then down to Sonata who looks thoughtful…

Then nods.

The only person I know who’s able to capture the Fog in anything like physical form is Sonata Dusk. She can capture Fog in the form of breath. Death rattles, final breaths, call it what you will, but she can capture it with her powers and use them for different things.

But we also found out that she can also learn from them.

The Fog that she takes out of people is something fundamental to them and, I suspect, that she’s able to pull it out of the living too, not just the recently dead, but for obvious reasons, I’d never ask her to test that theory. We’d only managed to pull the breath from a handful of the Legion’s kills, mostly because they were usually loud and sloppy, the main challenge had only ever been finding ones whose lungs were still intact.

None of the memories had ended up being useful, they’d only ever been flashes of insensate violence that Sonata couldn’t parse anything out of, but that was secondary to a far more important purpose than information gathering.

The Fog kept Sonata alive.

“Well, this tells us one thing at least,” I say grimly.

Adagio swears viciously as she turns and leans against the table while Aria settles Sonata near a small table.

“Yeah,” Aria says. “The Narc is Fogborn too… so that’s three for Legion, then the Ogre of the East, and the Narc, plus whatever the fuck the Entity spat out, plus that handler—”

“—the gunslinger,” I say—

“—yeah, that guy,” Aria continues, “which means we are shit out of luck, ladies.”

“Except we aren’t.”

All three of them look up at me when I say that, and I smile at them. It’s my best feature after all.

“Other than the slinger and the Legion, I don’t think any of these goons are on the same side,” I say. “The Ogre—Oni—whatever it is, took the Legion treading on its turf personally. If they hadn’t cheesed it when they did, that thing would have beat them into paste.”

The Oni didn’t even hesitate. One moment the psychotic little chimp that had dropped on me from the roof above the alley had been getting ready to introduce my insides to my outsides, and the next they were getting a brief and violent in-flight chiropractic appointment.

“The gunslinger shot the Oni to protect the Legion,” I say, mentally listing off my options, “and if the Narc was a Killer too, they don’t seem to give two shits about whatever Legion and company are up to, meaning they’re unrelated to the Thief since we’re pretty sure the Legion is an experiment.”

“Are we really sure about that?” Aria asks blithely.

“Less than I was,” I admit, “but the logic is sound. The Legion really strikes me as a work in progress, like someone testing their limits, and that sounds like our Thief.”

“Fair.” Aria waves a hand for me to continue.

I nod and start to pace as I try and organise my thoughts.

The Legion and the gunslinger belong to the Thief, that has to be the case, which makes the Oni a rogue agent? An accident maybe? Maybe. Then there’s the Narc who’s apparently pulling the Fog out of people, plus a new unknown… a direct agent of the Old Stain himself.

“An operator,” I mutter.

“What was that?” Adagio looks over at me with narrowed eyes.

“An operator behind enemy lines,” I say, looking back up at my sisters. It’s a massive leap of logic, but it is logic, and the thought process is sound. “The Narc isn’t just a Killer, they’re a Harvester.”

Aria groans as she slumps into her chair and buries her face in her hands.

“They’re harvesting Fog for the Entity,” she says through her fingers. “The suspension keeps it stable without the ritual hooks, and I’d bet the Entity planted them here early on to start recovering Fog to replace what you stole.”

“And now the Old Stain is coming to collect,” I say. “And probably try to bump the Thief off at the same time to get back what they stole. Two birds with one shiv.”

Silence descends over the room as we all sit and soak in the enormity of the connections that we’d just spun together. A lot of it was conjecture, but the hard truth is that we didn’t have a lot of other possible conclusions. Unless everyone involved is actually just acting completely randomly and in an unrelated manner, then this was the most like option.

“Then it’s official,” Adagio says grimly. “We’re not just sussing out murderers anymore, sisters.”

“No,” Sonata says in her creaky, gentle voice. “We aren’t.”

She looks up at the three of us with pain in her eyes.

“We, and all of Canterlot, are caught in the middle of a war.”

Author's Note

Welcome home, such as it is.

Support me on my Patreon where you can check out chapters of my original novel, Bare Knuckles & Butterflies, as they're released!

1.13

Normally, the Dreamtime of Canterlot is a comfort to me, but now I can’t find any peace in its Fog-wrapped streets.

Aria already sent a mass text to our little group with the grim news that we’re both painfully outnumbered and embroiled in what amounts to an interdimensional turf war between an Old God and an upstart thief of divinity.

No pressure, right?

It’s late morning by the time I flicker back into existence at the door of our shared apartment and, after carefully ensuring I’m not about to pop out right in front of someone again, I slice back into the Real and leave the Nightmare behind.

Pushing the door open, I step into the now-familiar den and pause at the threshold as my stomach twists itself into new and interesting shapes that internal organs probably shouldn’t be trying to maintain.

Tempest is sitting on the couch.

“Hola.”

“Hey.”

The tension is painful, but I step into the living room anyway and close the door behind me before tossing my jacket on the stand.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” I say quietly as I walk over to the loveseat across from the couch and sit down. “Are you okay?”

She chuckles quietly, that gentle baritone rumble that I like so much.

“Si, Mi sol, I’m fine,” she replies. “The cuts were shallow and… well, we heal fast, no?”

We definitely do that, now. Even the ‘normal’ Survivors like Tempest and Aria heal faster than any vanilla human should. It’s not quite comic-book levels of self-healing or anything, but you have to do some serious damage to a Survivor to put them down… Survivors aren’t called that for nothing.

“It still shouldn’t have happened,” I say.

Tempest nods slowly as she leans forward, bracing her elbows on her knees and resting her mouth against her clasped hands.

Her whole body is a weapon, and that’s something I will always admire about her. Tempest Shadow’s build is amazonian, with powerful slabs of corded muscle making up arms lined with the tattoos of a lifelong Chola gangbanger from the barrios of Las Pegasus, and a broad scarred back that has borne more weight that anyone has any right to have put on her shoulders.

Now, though, she doesn’t look powerful.

She looks tired.

“It will happen again,” Tempest says quietly.

“No, it won’t,” I reply grimly. “I promise.”

“Then you’re a liar, Mi sol.”

I jerk up straight in the seat to glare at Tempest who’s looking calmly at me over her knuckles with those cold, clear eyes of hers. The worst part is that she’s right. I want to get angry at her, I want to lash out at her for calling me a liar and that’s the point.

“You’re a Killer, Mi sol, whatever else you are, you’re still one of them,” Tempest says as she holds up her phone, which is set to ‘selfie’ mode so you can see yourself on the screen. “And you like it that way, I think.”

A pair of cerulean embers set into deep black like a pair of dying stars is staring back at me from the photo screen, and in that instant my rage is replaced with a deep, abiding shame.

Tempest sets the phone down as she stares at me, and I wilt back against the loveseat as I wrap my arms around myself.

“Adagio controls herself just fine,” I say.

“Si, she does,” Tempest allows. “Because she does not like what she is, because she tries to be better and stays away from the things that make her remember the monster she was so she can be further from it when it does come, but you don’t do that… you hold the monster close.”

“I have to.” I spit the words out bitterly. “There’s no one else! Someone has to be the monster who pushes back against other monsters! Why not me?”

“Because it’s killing you.”

Tempest holds out a hand across the table, and for a long moment, all I can do is stare at it. I want to take her hand, but at the same time, I’m terrified that if I do I’ll just hurt her again.

And again and again and again.

My fingers are blades made only to slice and cut.

I reach out and lay my hand in Tempest’s grip, and she tightens her grasp on me as she stands, pulls me around the little coffee table between us, and wraps her arms around me.

“You are beautiful,” Tempest says as she presses her face against my hair. “Just like this… you can be just like this.”

But what if I don’t want to be?

I don’t say that because how can I? How can I tell her that I don’t want to be me anymore? That I want to be hard and dead and filled with rage because it’s so, so much easier.

Despite that, something does manage to crack through my cloy self-obsession. Something icy and terrifying. Something very, very final about this exchange I’m having that gives me an awful premonition of dread in the pit of my stomach.

“I love you,” I sob.

"Si, te amo con todo mi corazón," Tempest mutters before pulling away and looking down at me. "That's why I am going to ask you this, Mi sol. That's why I am going to ask you to come away with me, now, and not look back."

“W-What?” I stare up at her, unable to properly believe what I just heard. “Leave? Just… Just leave? With everything that’s going on!?”

“Yes!” Tempest snarls as she grips my shoulders. “Yes! Because if we stay then you will slide deeper and deeper into darkness. So run with me! One last time! This last Trial! I am begging you to survive and come away with me!

She steps back and waves out towards the south.

“We can go away!” Tempest almost sobs. “We can do anything! We can cross the border and go to Marexico and you can sit in the sun and never think about the Fog again! You can be happy!”

Tempest links her hands with mine and grips tight.

“We can be happy.”

“What about Aria, Adagio, and Sonata?” I ask shakily. “What about Sour and Starlight and everyone in this city?”

A bitter laugh escapes Tempest’s lips as she shakes her head, sending her ragged, hanging fringe of hair scattering around her face.

“You don’t see it do you?” She asks.

I step back from her, staring up and frowning.

“You don’t see that they are only here because of you!” Tempest says angrily, and my jaw clicks open. “They stay because you stay, because you believe in what you’re doing and because they believe in you. If you left, they would follow. Your sisters would roam and wander again, Sour and L’strella would go off and be happy somewhere! But they can’t because they believe in you!”

“So it’s my fault?!” I snarl, ripping my hands away from Tempest. “I’m doing the right thing! I’m fighting for this fucking city despite everything that it’s taken from me because it’s the right thing to do!”

“MIERDA!” Tempest spits. “You’re not fighting because it’s right, you’re fighting because fighting is all you know how to do anymore and I’m done fighting with you!”

I take a faltering step back from Tempest as my gut tightens with a stony weight.

“What?” The word comes out as soft and brittle as wet clay “You’re not… you don’t mean that, right?”

Tempest’s expression hardens for a moment, then relaxes as she holds out her hand once more.

“Come away with me,” she says softly. “Please, Mi sol, I am begging you to put the darkness away and the Fog behind you and just… just stop fighting—” she stretches her arm out a little closer to me—“please… come with me.”

Tears trickle down her cheeks, the one from her right eye traces along the line of her scar down to her lip like a channel while her chest hitches and jerks like she’s trying to keep her heart from breaking by willpower alone.

“So that’s it?” I ask weakly. “You’re just going to run from the fight like a coward?”

“FUCK YOU PUTA!” Tempest snaps, her outstretched hand curling instantly into a fist as she puts a finger up to my face and advances on me.

“I’ve been fighting since I was born!” She snarls. “I fought in the dirt poor barrios! I fought in the streets with the Kings! I fought in more Trials than I can even remember! I don’t even know how long I spent there! I can’t even remember how old I am anymore because I spent so long in that fucking place so don’t you dare call me a coward!”

For a moment, I swear her eyes are red, and it takes me a moment to realise that the reason for that is because everything is red. My vision is washed in crimson as my blood is boiling in my veins. I’m itching for a fight that I know I’ll win because she’s just human. Durable and modified… but human.

Except she’s crying and so am I.

Everything is coming apart. The woman I thought I loved—that I was so sure that I loved—is screaming at me and I’m not any better. I hurt her, she hurts me, then we’ll apologise and do it all again.

Slowly, Tempest lowers her hand, then wipes at her face.

“Lo Siento,” she mutters. “I… I didn’t want it to be like this.”

“Me neither,” I say, and my voice trembles.

“You won’t come?”

I shake my head.

“You won’t stay?” I ask.

“No.”

I swallow thickly, then nod. I can’t stop crying and for once I don’t bother trying to curb the tears as Tempest turns her back on me to go to our… to my room. When she comes back out she has a large kitbag slung over her shoulder and a long heavy black coat on. Her hood is pulled over her head to keep the snow off, and her eyes are still the sharp, clear blue that enchanted me years ago when I first saw them in the Trials.

“I love you,” I say brokenly.

“Si,” Tempest replies quietly. “I love you too.”

“Please don’t go.”

She doesn’t answer except to shake her head. She doesn’t say anything else either. Tempest just puts her back to the apartment and leaves. A part of me screams to go after her, to make her stay, but I can’t find it in me, so instead I just drop to my knees and curl around myself as what is left of my heart falls to pieces on the floor.

“How are you holding up?”

The afternoon sun is bright in the winter, but fortunately, it rarely sticks around for long. Down here, in the canals, the shadows are deep enough that I can exist in my Killer shape without too much pain, and whatever pain I am in right now is far lesser than it would be if were I still wearing my human flesh.

It’s easier, right now, to just be numb.

“So you know?” I ask quietly.

“She sent us all a message,” Adagio replies. “And asked us to look after you.”

“Of course she did.”

I walk along the wall of the canal where we found the dead vagrant, scraping my fingerblades along the graffitied stone. The Legion must have come back at some point because their sobriquet is stenciled across the wall in bright green, purple, and orange paint.

The Legion.

“Her heart was never in this fight,” Adagio says softly as she steps close to me. It’s easier to be near her than anyone else. She’s not human. She never was. “She’s tired and the Trials ate at her… that she came out even modestly intact is a miracle.”

“Do you think I should have gone with her?” I ask as I turn my demon’s eyes on my elder sister. “Should I have left this all behind? Said ‘fuck Canterlot’ and run half a world away to relax on a beach somewhere?”

Adagio shrugs.

She really is beautiful in that classical sense. She’s tall, but not towering, with noble, patrician features, and a strong bearing. Right now she’s wearing something that looks like it belongs about a century out of fashion, and yet somehow she makes it work. Her beige and blue dress is made from thick fabric, the kind worn in the northern climes, and she has a colorfully knitted shawl wrapped around her shoulders which could easily be wrapped over her head if it began raining or snowing.

“In a way, I wish you had,” Adagio replies finally.

“Why?”

She smiles wanly at me.

“Because you’re my sister and I love you, you dolt,” Adagio says. “Because I want you to be happy.”

“I don’t think I know how to do that anymore,” I admit as I turn away from her.

“One day you will,” Adagio says, putting a hand on my shoulder.

The touch of another is an alien sensation in this body. Not even Aria is fully comfortable with my Killer shape, and I think it might be the case that she loves me more fully than any of my other friends.

Adagio, though, has no fear of me, regardless of how stable or unstable I become.

“She thinks I’m going to become like them,” I say, turning to look at Adagio. “Like my older siblings, like the other Fogborn.”

“It’s a rational concern,” Adagio replies.

“Do you think I will?”

She doesn’t reply immediately, which is a reply in and of itself, and when she does answer it comes out with a touch of weary resignation.

“I think that Tempest was right to be afraid for you,” she says slowly. “That she was right when she said that you cleave too close to the Fog.”

“I’m fine.”

My fingers clash against one another as I stare up at the graffiti. I have no actual proof of my suspicions regarding Legion’s true identity, but my gut is telling me I’m right. It makes sense… if the Thief was looking for someone who was tailor-made for conversion, then they’d need an ex-Survivor, and even though the brats were only in there for a couple of Trials, they were still touched by the Old Stain and changed on the inside, just like Aria and the rest.

Adagio joins me, standing at my side and staring up at the graffiti. She isn’t really looking at it, though.

Her regard is on me.

“You know something.”

It isn’t a question.

“I think the Legion might be Anon-A-Miss,” I say quietly.

Adagio’s gaze hardens as she turns to face me properly. The first expression crossing that achingly beautiful face of hers is disbelief which lasts all of a heartbeat before morphing to calculation, then dread, then weary acceptance.

“It’s… possible,” Adagio admits uneasily.

“I did some snooping around Rarity’s head earlier,” I say. “Her sister went missing months ago, and something happened to Scootaloo just prior to that; do you think you can do a quick search?”

She pulls out her phone in reply, opening up her web browser and tapping away at the search engine. It barely takes her any time at all before she clicks her tongue quietly and turns to hold up the phone for me to read.

The Canterlot Herald; a local rag that had always been relatively to-the-point and avoided a lot of the yellow journalism that plagued some of the other smaller news outlets after they made the switch to online content management. Their headlines tended to be dry but informative, which I prefer if I’m being honest. I’m not reading the news to be titillated, I’m reading it to learn something

“I… was I wrong?” I ask, feeling an odd mixture of regret, relief, and an odd pang of sadness.

The article webpage carries a picture of a familiar young girl with hair cut to a short pixie bob, a confident smile that’s almost a smirk, wearing a hoodie, and the headline above the image reads:

Crossfire From Gang Massacre Kills Local Teen

Early this evening officers of the Canterlot Police Seventh Precinct answered a 911 call originating in the Ponyville Commons near the area colloquially recognised as the ‘East End’ with a warning that gunshots had been heard coming from a local warehouse. They arrived in force and cordoned off a three block area, and it was during this initial point in the operation that the police discovered the body of a young girl who had been reported as a runaway some months earlier.

This terrible tragedy unfortunately requires some context. The reason for the 911 call and the source of the shots being fired were discovered less than an hour later once the police entered the warehouse where they discovered a scene of exceptional violence. CSI reports and Police witness statements agree that some kind of fight broke out in the warehouse, likely internecine, and resulted in a shootout that, from the scene, devolved into a brutal melee. Many of the bodies in the warehouse showed signs of serious physical trauma, both impact and hacking.

Curiously, the investigators on sight were unable to determine exactly who was fighting whom. There were hundreds of spent shell casings on the ground, and the volume and angle suggested that the victims, who all appeared to owe allegiance to the same gang according to their tattoos and clothing, were all firing at the same thing.

The tragedy, then, continues with a scene that the CSI’s were able to piece together from physical evidence alone. The body of the young female victim was found in front of a door which had been thrown open and current reports state the following as the most likely course of events:

‘The female victim approached the site to investigate the noise, then approached the door to listen or open it to peek through. An armed member of the local gang trying to escape the melee most likely then opened the door just as the victim approached, and reflexively opened fire.’

Coroner records state that the cause of death was a result of over a dozen rounds from small automatic arms fire striking her in the back suggesting she saw, and attempted to flee, before being gunned down. It’s possible she was killed to keep from reporting the truth of the matter to the police, but unfortunately, as it currently stands, we may never know the truth.

“Was I?” I ask, looking up at Adagio.

She turns to look over the article again, confusion on her features as she reads through it again and again.

“It’s the Ogre,” she says finally, looking back up at me, and I blink in confusion a few times before realising what she’s saying.

“The gang massacre,” I say quietly, my last two brain cells actually firing for once. “The Ogre is what they were trying to kill, but clearly they failed and got hyper-murdered instead.”

A moment later the other shoe drops and I shake my head in disbelief. I can’t help but laugh a little weakly as I gesture at Adagio’s phone.

“So wait,” I say. “That means that Scoots heard a gang unloading half an arsenal trying to kill an immortal hellbeast and thought, ‘hey, that sounds keen, lemme get in on that!’ or something?”

“That’s crazy,” Adagio replies.

“That’s a teenager,” I say dryly. “But then that puts the kibosh on my theory…”

“Maybe,” Adagio says quietly as she turns back to her phone and starts flicking through again.

“Wanna share with the class, ‘Dagi?” I ask

She doesn’t reply. She just keeps searching for almost ten minutes flicking through different sources and web pages. I’m a little impressed. I mean, I’m good at digging up dirt, but Adagio has literally been doing this since before I was born.

“Here we go,” she says as she turns the phone to me again.

“Funeral home break-in?” I read the headline off as I look over the phone at Adagio. “You think?”

“They didn’t report anything stolen, just broken windows,” Adagio says. “But the article suggests the break-in hit the small morgue inside the home where they keep bodies prior to the funeral.”

“Did they still have a funeral?” I ask.

“They did, but…”

“Let me guess,” I say, narrowing my eyes. “It was closed-casket.”

She nods. “And private. It doesn’t even list where she was buried.”

My fingers clash against each other again as I turn back to the graffiti on the wall, a new pit opening up in my stomach as I consider everything I just learned. It’s possible. It’s still goddamn possible.

“Find me that grave.”

“Give me forty-eight hours,” Adagio replies. “Should I tell the others?”

I shake my head.

I don’t want to put them on a wild goose chase, I also don’t want to get their hopes up in case I am wrong. More importantly, though… I don’t want to tip my hand too soon. The last thing I need is to trip at the finish line, so I’ll let Adagio do the footwork and when we turn up a real lead, that’s when we’ll move.

“What about you?” she asks.

My mind turns to a certain bridge, and the coming evening.

“I’ve got a meeting.”

Author's Note

Those without the stomach for this place must move on.

Support me on my Patreon where you can check out chapters of my original novel, Bare Knuckles & Butterflies, as they're released!

1.14

The bridge is empty when I arrive, although for all I know I’m a little early. We didn’t exactly set a time beyond the vague approximation of the evening, but that’s alright. The dark comes early to Canterlot in the winter, and having some time to myself probably isn’t a bad thing, and today has been an objectively shitty day.

“One, two, Sunny’s coming for you~” I sing the familiar tune under my breath as I lean against the rail and watch the water move slowly beneath me.

By now, Tempest is probably almost out of the city, assuming she made a beeline. She might’ve stopped for food or something else, and realistically speaking I know that I could find her if I tried. All I would have to do is step into the Dreamtime, reach for the familiar toil of her mind, and then pull myself there.

I don’t.

Nothing healthy is going to come of that if I do.

“Three, four, better lock your doors~”

Lock them tight. Keep me out. The last thing anyone needs is me in their lives because all I’ll bring them is bad dreams and bloodshed. Just because you remember the dead doesn’t mean you should offer them a place at your table.

“Bad luck,” I mutter.

“What is?”

“SHIT!” I startle backward and stare at Wallflower Blush.

“Oh, uhm, sorry,” she steps back and wraps her arms around herself. “I probably should have said something, but you looked like you were thinking about something important.”

I blow out a sigh and put a hand over my chest. Dead or not, my heart almost leapt right out of my ribcage. How is it I can never tell she’s there?! It’s nuts. She’s like one of those actors in downtown who masquerade as statues: totally in the background right until they move and you damn near shit yourself.

“No, it’s okay,” I say, waving off her apology. “I should just… fuck, I dunno, put a bell on you or something.”

She laughs quietly, and I work up the strength to smile at her. She’s wearing the same dark coat and black boots as before, and what looks like a frumpy sweater underneath that. Her hair is still a tangle of green, and she cards her fingers through it a few times in what I think is a habitual tic as she looks up at me.

“So how was your day, Pretty Girl?” I ask, turning on what I tentatively label as my charm.

I think it’s on because her cheeks go a little pink.

“Are you always going to call me that?” She asks with a slightly crooked smile. “And it was okay… it was quiet.”

“Sounds nice, and yeah, probably will,” I reply.

Smirk, Shimmer, smirk. Smile like there’s nothing wrong. Smile until your face splits open because everything is fine and nothing is going wrong.

“What’s wrong?”

Fuck.

My smirk falters.

“Why would something be wrong?” I ask, forcing a chuckle. “I’m fine.”

Wallflower shakes her head as she turns to stare up at me in confusion. She’s looking at me like she can’t decide what to make of me, or like there’s something clashing in her mind.

“I… you look sad, that’s all,” she says finally.

Whatever momentum I had going that was keeping me together slowly drains out of me. I sag backward against the rail and slide down until I’m sitting on the miserably cold sidewalk of the bridge, and wrap my arms around my knees, clutch them close, and bury my face against my legs.

“Sunset?!” Wallflower's tone pitches higher as she kneels beside me.

“M’sorry,” I sob.

All of a sudden I can’t stop crying. It’s like the whole world just hit me all at once. Being outnumbered, being caught in a war, the breakup, losing Tempest not just as a partner but as a friend and as one of the very few pillars I thought I could reliably stand on just slams into me like a hammer, and now I can’t even breathe.

It’s too much.

It’s all just too much.

Arms wrap around me and pull me into a warm embrace, and suddenly my vision is filled with tangled green hair as Wallflower holds onto me, and against all reason, I cling to her. I bury my face against her shoulder and let out what little I have left in me.

Turns out if you hurt them bad enough, even a Killer can cry.

I’m not really sure how long we sit like this, but it’s probably longer than I can afford. There are too many things left to do, too many threats to manage, too many Killers to track, too many leads to follow up on, and for the first time in a long time, I’m really not sure I can do this.

“You really aren’t anything like I imagined,” Wallflower says quietly.

I laugh weakly as I draw away and wipe at my eyes and nose.

“You imagined meeting me?”

Wallflower clams up and looks away as she sits down beside me, and I laugh a little more. She’s cute… and really closed off. I know the look because I’ve worn that look. It’s the look of someone that the world has treated badly over and over, and maybe some of it was her fault, but I’d be willing to bet the majority wasn’t.

Unlike me, I’d be willing to bet someone as sweet as Wallflower probably just got dealt a shitty hand and had to play it out regardless of what she wanted from life.

“Uhm, can I ask what happened?” Wallflower looks over at me with her head resting on her knees. “You seemed… well, not so bad yesterday.”

I snort and nod.

“Yeah well, a lot can change in twenty-four hours,” I reply. “My girlfriend left me, for one… and it turns out the whole time I thought we were fine she was basically dying on the inside, so go me.”

“Why didn’t she say anything beforehand?” Wallflower asks. “You’re not psychic.”

Well, that’s only technically true. Oneiromancy is a distant cousin to Cerebromancy—true mind magic—so in the strictest, definitional sense of the term, I kind of am psychic. Just not the kind that Wallflower means.

“I’m not the easiest person to talk to,” I say.

Wallflower watches me for a moment, unmoving and unblinking, before wrinkling her nose slightly and shrugging.

“I uhm… I guess I’ll take your word for it,” she says.

“Cute.” I smirk at her, and it’s a little more genuine this time. “But really, I’m… I’m kind of intense most of the time. I have this bad habit of running roughshod over people to get where I think I need to go, and I think I just ran her over one too many times.”

Tempest stood by me for so long. She endured my outbursts as much as I endured hers and we fought almost as often as not, but neither of us wanted to admit how unhealthy we were getting so we just faked it. Fake it til you make it, right?

“She and I… we went through some bad shit together and came out of it holding hands, but…” I trail off as I lean back against the rails and rub at my face. “I guess, maybe once we get past all the grim stuff we just didn’t have that much left in common.”

I drag my hands down my face and sigh. That was a fact that I’d gone to great lengths not to think about or admit to myself, but the truth is that I know I’ve been pulling away from Tempest for the past few months, and she was doing the same thing. Neither of us said anything about it maybe because we didn’t want to confront it, but the truth is that we've been drifting apart for a long time.

That last argument in the apartment was the breaking point, and even through all of that Tempest still made one last attempt to reconcile and try again.

“She wanted me to go with her to Marexico,” I say, laughing bitterly as I stare up at the snow-split sky. “To Marexico! Me! Can you even imagine?!”

“Not really,” Wallflower says. “It sounds like she wanted you to run away, and that… well, it doesn’t really seem like you, I guess.”

Another snort escapes me.

“Says you,” I reply with a chuckle. “All I’ve ever done is run away… mostly from the people who love me.”

“Why?”

Why indeed. Why did I run from the orphanage where I was raised so many times despite there being nowhere for me to go? Why did I run from Princess Celestia after defying her again and again? Even when the Anon-A-Miss scandal hit, all I did was run.

I ran all the way off the edge of the roof.

“I don’t know,” I say quietly.

Wallflower makes a small, thoughtful hum as she turns her head to stare across the street before leaning back to stare up at the sky with me.

“Maybe because it’s the people we love, and who love us, that hurt us,” she says finally. “Because this whole world is ugly like that, you know? It just is.”

An ugly world.

Maybe Wallflower is right. It’s certainly nihilistic, but the fact of the matter is that she’s not exactly wrong. Loving someone means opening up to them, opening up means being vulnerable, and the hard truth is that I’m really shit at letting myself be vulnerable.

That’s probably why I ended up pulling away from Tempest in the first place.

“Sure is foggy out tonight,” Wallflower remarks quietly.

My heart all but stills in my chest at her words, and I sit up sharply. I got distracted… complacent! I take a deep breath and spit it out in a curse as I clamber to my feet, dragging Wallflower up with me. I can taste the copper and ash of the Old Stain’s realm leaking through.

“Hey! What are you—?”

I turn and grab her by the shoulder.

“GO!” I snarl, thrusting a finger out and away towards Whitetail.

The Fog splits and opens in a tunnel at my command. The Fog is still thin and weak, and I can yoke it to my will for a while yet, but not forever. Soon it will be too thick for anything human to escape it.

Wallflower’s eyes widen as she stares down the tunnel of Fog that’s swirling ahead of her before turning back to me.

“Sunset what’s going on?” Her voice cracks, and I grimace.

“Wallie, listen to me,” I say calmly, taking her face in both hands as I stare her down.

The whites of my eyes blacken and my pupils ignite into cold embers.

“Get. OUT!”

Wallflower’s staggers away from me, then turns tail and runs. So much for my new friend. I won’t be able to look her in the eye after this but I should probably have a chat with her after I beat this sorry Fog-baby to make sure she doesn’t go post my ass up on creepypasta or something.

My human shape falters and shifts as I turn back to face the side of the bridge leading towards the Commons. Blades like silver knives slice out from fingers whose skin darkens to rubbery red. Blue ice flows through my veins and Fog sinks into my muscles; into my limbs and my heart, tainting my tongue with the blood and ash of the Trials.

“Which one are you?” I snarl into the Fog. “Legion? Or maybe their gunslinging handler? Did you track me here to take me out? Better shoot fast before I shove that rusty harpoon launcher right up your—”

A raw, wet noise like the panting of a diseased coyote precedes a shape emerging from the Fog. It’s not tall, at least I don’t think so. The shape, at first, stops me in my tracks because it doesn’t look even remotely human. Most Killers are at least humanoid. As it resolves, though, I see why it looked so misshapen.

It’s wearing a long, mantled coat of crudely cut brown leather done in an older style, maybe seventeenth century, that's covering a hideous hunch and whose hood drapes over whatever ruin is made of its face. Its hands are mutant things, clad in gloves custom made to accommodate a hand with too many fingers and it moves with an ugly, limping gait that reminds me of no one so much as my twisted older brother ‘Billy’.

One gnarled hand is twitching; opening and closing in a manner that’s familiar, and it takes me a moment to realise it’s the same tic I have for clashing my fingerblades together. The other hand is gripping a cane whose dark, wooden length is twisted with age, and whose head is capped with dented, bloodstained metal.

“What,” I hiss, taking a step back, “the fuck are you?”

Its free hand stills then jerks out to the side. The nameless Killer snaps their fingers and the Fog spirals and congeals into their hand in the shape of a vial-and-syringe.

“The Narc.”

The name spills from me before I can stop it, and it cocks its cowled head in a manner that makes it look almost… amused.

“Narc?” Its voice is a wet, raw-meat burble. “No—” It hooks a thumb under the depressed plunger of the syringe in its hand and draws it up, and the Fog in the air thins as a golden serum fills the vial. “—no Narc here, Shimmer.”

A chill goes down my spine at the sound of my name at the same moment it jams the syringe into its chest and injects.

Spasms wrack its body as it snaps its head up to stare at me with hollow eyes and a shattered jaw, both like caverns lit from within by poisonous gold.

“Call. Me. BLIGHT!”

It moves even faster than the Legion, bolting forward with manic glee, twisted legs pumping as it careens forward. I barely have time to think, so I don’t. I flicker to the side, slipping between the veil of the Dreamtime for a brief moment and stepping out a few feet to the left.

The Narc—no, the Blight—rips through the space I was occupying a split second prior and slams into the railing like a rodeo bull. I’m about to jeer at it, too, but—

“OH SHIT!”

The Blight recovers so fast I have no time to react. It kicks off from the rail it just slammed into like a goddamn pinball, shrieking as it lashes out with its cane. I try to dodge but it’s too fast even for me and the metallic head cracks across my skull, loosening teeth and rattling my brain as it sends me sprawling and rolling across the asphalt.

Its chuckle is an ugly glutinous noise that starts in the back of its throat as it advances on me, smacking the head of the cane against its open palm.

“You’re slow, Shimmer,” the Blight cackles. “Where’s your flair? Where’re those blades of yours?”

I breathe deep.

And flicker.

“Here.”

The Blight staggers as I reappear practically in its arms with all ten of my blades buried deep in the taunting bastard’s guts. It doubles over and goes slack against me, its shattered jaw jagging back and forth as its beaten lungs try to drag in air and Fog.

I rip my blades out sideways, left and right, sending the Blight staggering back. My hands are sticky with fluids that reflect colors I have no proper name for, and which hurt my eyes to look at for too long, as I flick them clean.

“Your ichor is a shit substitute for real blood,” I snarl as I clash my fingers together at them. “But I’ll just have to settle for less.”

The Blight shakes with its wet, jackal laughter. The grotesque wound I inflicted is already sealing up around flesh that moves like viscous clay, and the Blight runs their hand over the grievous damage almost lovingly.

“Yeah, there we go…” it hisses. “That’s the stuff.”

It lurches forward like a striking snake, lashing the cane out in a hard lateral blow and the Blight follows with a rapid combination of swings that, to someone not paying close attention, look wild and uncontrolled.

I backpedal, step by step letting the blight force me back as it cracks concrete and asphalt with every blow while I track its motions.

It’s aggressive, but not stupid. It knows how to fight. The way it handles that cane is almost martial; turning it and catching its weight, rolling it over its palm and across the back of its hand to rapidly switch its position.

“Come on, Shimmer,” it sneers. “If you’re going to fight me then fight me! Unless you’re planning to run away again!”

My fingerblades clash in the instant before I vanish, lunging through the Dream and slicing through the veil.

Blades meet cane with a deafening clangor, and the Blight’s legs buckle under the weight of my blow while the hammering force drives them down to a knee as it catches all ten of my fingers across the length.

“Who’s running now?” I snarl.

“You.”

It’s unnatural muscles bulge and it knocks me back with main strength. I stumble over my own feet, wheeling my arms to fight for balance as the Blight surges forward, spinning its cane like a parade baton around its body. It straightens out, and its hunch distorts freakishly to accommodate its new posture, and I have to blunder back to keep from getting brained from a brutal lateral cross-swing.

“Faster, Shimmer!” It laughs. “Let’s go faster!”

Blight lashes out, and I slash wide, knocking away blows left and right, and every hit sends shocks up my arms.

They’re playing too much though. They’re letting me learn how they move and how they think, and soon I find my feet, and a second later I find my rhythm too. My wild slashes refine into graceful, spiraling strikes; I step forward, then turn, slash, step, turn, slash, and suddenly it's Blight backing up as my fingerblades bite the air in front of them like gnashing teeth.

They strike wide, swinging the heavy cane like a club at my head.

I flicker.

The heavy head hits dead air and carries on as I reappear right where I’d left off before dropping low inside their reach and twisting violently to slash upward.

Fog-forged silver blades split through mutant flesh, tendon, and bone, then out the other side, and the Blight shrieks as its arm and cane go flying and ichor sprays in arterial arcs from the severed stump as it rears, then staggers and falls flat on its back clutching at the ruin of its arm.

While the Blight thrashes on the ground I walk over to where their arm fell, casually pick it up, then make my way over to them to toss it beside them.

“Y’dropped this,” I say before stepping over them and planting my boot on their chest.

Their pained snarls warp into something like laughter as they jerk and twist under my foot.

“Who are you?!” I bark. “Which one made you? The Old Stain? The Thief?!” I drop down until I’m straddling them and press two fingerblades to their temples. “I could reach into your diseased brain and rip it out, but honestly I’d rather not root around in there, so talk before I start cutting bits off! And believe me, Blight—” I grip them by the collar of their long coat and wrench them up to face me—“at the rate you heal there’ll be more of you on the floor than attached by the time I let you die.”

They don’t answer my threats, they just convulse in paroxysms of high-pitched laughter that slowly recedes from the wet jackal howl to something… human.

“Why are you laughing?!”

“Sorry! Sorry!” Blight cackles as they wave their one remaining hand, and the sound of their—no, her—voice cracks me across the head and leaves me more dazed than if she’d walloped me full-force with her cane. “I just… I’m happy! I’m so happy!”

Blight grips the hem of her hood and pulls it back. The shattered, cavernous face is gone, as is the poisonous gold that lit it from deep inside, and in its place is one that's far more terrible.

Her eyes are a soft shade of cerise that glitters with happy tears as she lunges up past my numb, stunned hands and wraps her remaining arm around me, hugging me tightly and pressing her cheek to mine, shrouding my vision with short prismatic strands, and as she does, a tiny, near-invisible strand of sapphire light twinkles into existence between us.

Despite the fact that her right arm is entirely gone, Rainbow Dash hugs me for all she’s worth as she laughs uproariously.

“I knew you’d get out of that hellhole!” Rainbow continues, giving me another squeeze before drawing back to look me in the eyes. “You’re way too good to let that thing in the dark keep a hold of you! When did you get back?”

I jerk backward and out of her grip, stumbling up onto legs I can’t quite feel. My fingers clash against one another over and over and over. I’m trying to drown out the ringing in my skull but it’s not working. This isn’t real. It’s not real.

The last of her mutated Killer shape sloughs away from her as she stands up, leaving behind the lithe and limber runner I once held so close to my heart that I let her stab me in it. She picks up her severed arm with the same casual disregard I had, jams it against the stump, and the flesh twists sickeningly as her severed limb reattaches itself.

This can’t be real.

“Ooh! Ow! Pins and needles!”

Rainbow Dash gives her right arm a few good shakes, then tests her grip a couple of times before tightening her fingers around something invisible. As her fingers close, her cane folds out of the Fog from wherever it had flown when I tore her arm off.

“Good as new!” Rainbow smirks as she holds up her cane and arm triumphantly.

Her smile fades after a moment, softening back as she sighs.

Rainbow Dash is the Blight, and the Blight is the Narc. She’s the Killer who’s been murdering her way through the drug scene of north Canterlot for the past year.

“Still hate me, huh?” She asks as she sets her cane down, lets go, and it stands upright of its own accord. “That’s okay… like, I get it, I really fucked you over.”

I’m too shocked to even feel the reflexive hate I have for her right now.

“How?”

“Huh?” Rainbow raises an eyebrow.

I just gesture at all of her.

“Oh.” She looks down at herself, then over at the cane, then chuckles as she looks back up. “It’s kind of a long story, but uh, the short of it is that I went through a rough patch after you 'died'. Took a few bad turns and did some bad things, but I’m doing a lot better now.

“So let’s see, uh, me and Fluttershy got together, and she’s been really good for me, y’know? Keeps me honest and all that. I had a, uh… well, I got into some bad stuff, but I went to rehab and I still go to all the meetings and junk and—Oh!” She digs into her pocket, then pulls out a large, wide coin. “Check it out!”

No… not a coin.

A chip.

“One year clean!” She says proudly. “Fluttershy was over the moon when I came home with it, you shoulda seen her.”

I’m supposed to be the queen of bad dreams here. Me. I’m not supposed to be trapped in a waking nightmare more surreal than Rarity’s blood-watered corpse-tree.

Rainbow tucks the chip back into her pocket before looking back up at me.

“Anyway, when I heard you were back I just had to swing by,” she says with a small grin. “I missed the hell outta you, y’know? Even if we aren’t friends anymore, I’ve still got your back, okay?”

“You’re a murderer,” I say bluntly.

“And?” Rainbow asks with a shrug. “They’re pushers and dealers. Y’know how many people they’ve killed with all the junk they’re peddling? I know there’s that whole—” she raises her fingers in air quotes— “if you kill a murderer the number in the world stays the same, but I figure if I kill like, a shitload of’em, then it balances out the other way, right? Or, I guess, maybe it’s just the principle of the thing, y’know?”

It’s hard to argue her point. The Narc’s MO has always been the scum of Canterlot’s underbelly, but still…

My fingers clash together as I narrow my eyes at Rainbow and start to circle around her. She doesn’t look like a half-assed Killer. Not like the Legion. Her body, her powers, the way she casually manipulates the Fog… no, her nature was forged by the master of the Trials.

I’d bet my blades on it.

“You’re not with the Thief,” I state, rather than ask.

“Hell no,” Rainbow says, shaking her head. “The Entity pushed another one of us through to get back at them. I’m on your side.”

Metal shrieks against metal as my fingers twitch.

“I’m not on the Entity’s side, Dashie,” I hiss.

She shrugs, unperturbed by my tone. “Yeah? Neither am I. I just work for the dude, okay? I said what I said… I’m on your side.”

My sharp teeth grind as I clench my jaw tight. I hate her so much that my blood feels like it’s going to boil right out of my veins, but the fact of the matter is that I am hilariously outgunned right now. As much as I want to spit in her face, I can’t turn down the help… for the sake of my friends and my sisters, I can’t afford it.

“I hate you.”

“I know.” Rainbow steps forward and holds out a hand. “But I owe you, so you’ve got me whenever you need me, a’right? You’n me, Shimmer, just until all this crap is over, then, if you want, I’ll never talk to you again. How’s that?”

Blowing out a slow breath, I force my power to recede back into the depths of my soul. Red flesh and blue veins fade away, leaving clean amber skin behind as my fingerblades withdraw and fade into the Fog that surrounds us, and my black longcoat ripples and dissolves into my black leather jacket as I reach out to take the proffered hand and grip it tight.

“Deal.”

Author's Note

Fan the flames! Mold the metal! We are raising an army!

Support me on my Patreon where you can check out chapters of my original novel, Bare Knuckles & Butterflies, as they're released!

1.15

To whom do I owe my life?

That’s a question I ask myself more than is probably healthy because I sure as shit don’t owe it to myself. If I’d had my way I’d have been roadkill on the front step of Canterlot High two years ago, posthumously traumatising an entire school’s worth of kids because I couldn’t emotionally handle being friendless, homeless, and destitute all at the same time.

That last part, at least, I can almost find it in me not to hate myself for. I hate that I chose to run away—to give up—again, but even I’m willing to acknowledge that at the time I had a lot of cards stacked up against me. I’m smart enough to know what a statistic looks like and it looked like me at the time.

None of that really changes the fact that I chose to die, and that over the course of whatever amount of time actually passed in the Trials, granting the nature of the place, something in me changed.

It just didn’t change me, if that makes any sense.

Every day is a struggle just to wake up, and by wake up I mean step back into the skin of Sunset Shimmer and give up my claws and the feeling of omnipotence that comes with being nothing more than a cold-blooded Killer.

Well, hot-blooded in my case.

So I don’t owe myself my life, that’s right out.

Do I owe it to my friends? To Sour Sweet, Starlight, and Redheart? Or to my family? To Aria and Adagio and Sonata?

Or do I owe it to the Old Stain? That last one is a tempting conclusion given that Its intercession is the only reason I’m still around. It snatched me from freefall and dragged me into a nightmare realm that, paradoxically, reminded me what it felt like to be in control.

For the first time in too long… I was the one who made the decisions.

Then I became a Killer and, once again, it’s tempting to say the Old Stain made me into a Killer but that’s not true. Sonata and Adagio know that just as well as I do.

It never forced us to choose. It gave us a choice and we took it.

We chose to make our hearts cold. To give up the real world and submerge ourselves in our darkest memories and allow them to transform us into something powerful.

Do I owe the Old Stain my life?

Maybe.

The Dreamtime splits and fractures as I step into the shadows of a verdant canopy. Enormous, old-growth trees stretch upward like arboreal claws trying to tear the stars from the sky for the hubris of their light. The depths of the Everfree are filled with dark places. Places that exist on no map, because no one comes out this far, or at the very least they don’t do it on purpose.

Well, no one human comes out here anyway.

I follow the tight, narrow path through the trees, and the further I go the darker it gets. It’s already night in the dead of winter, and yet somehow there’s even less light here.

It’s the sort of darkness that swallows the soul.

Deeper and deeper I go, following the instinctive pull like a noose around my neck dragging me inwards.

The Fog swallows me whole as I take one more step, and the world rocks away from me. I leave behind the Real. I leave behind the Dreamtime itself. Right now, I’m don’t want to be in this world, and even though I know I’ll have to go back, I just can’t right now.

There are too many things gnawing at me; Rainbow Dash’s nature as the Blight and one of the murderers I’d been hunting for half a year, the possibility that my choice to drag the Crusaders into my Trial as bait created Killers, the fact that I’m now, even by proxy, working for the Old Stain again.

So I let the Fog swallow me, and I step through the shadows and the formless space between spaces for just a moment before emerging on the other side.

Bum-bum bum-bum bum-bum-bum-bum bum bum bum bum bum…

Mister Sandman… bring me a dre~am.

Make her the cutest, that I’ve ever se~en.

An old song crackles over the P.A. system that is, I would assume, somehow wired into the walls of my Trial. Well, what’s left of it anyway. It’s not nearly the size it was when the Entity congealed it for me.

Call it my grand prize for beating the Old Stain at Its own game.

My own little marble of reality. A place where I’m as good as a god.

“Itty bitty living space,” I mutter as I walk down one of the hallways, scrapping my claws lightly along the bank of lockers and savoring the tinny shriek of metal on metal.

I’d stolen so much from the Old Stain, and most of it is collected right here. About a dozen or so hooks, still in perfect condition, frozen in time along with the rest of this timeless realm.

Only one other living person knows this marble still exists. She’s the only one I trust to know about it because she understands this side of me better than anyone else.

I pause in front of one of the hooks and rest a clawed hand on it. The hook is cold and heavy under my palm, and the metal is grim with unwholesome purpose. This marble is mine. If I wanted to I could be so much stronger. All it would take is a few people on hooks, one or two… maybe three. I could complete a bastardised and narcissistic ritual to myself, drink their Fog, and…

“I wonder what would happen.” I give the chain a solid push, sending it rattling.

A Killer drinking all of the Fog in a person for themselves could be impossibly dangerous.

Or, for all I know, that’s how the Old Stain got Its start in the first place. The Thief and I both proved beyond a doubt that the Stain’s power isn’t immutable. It can be moved and shifted around… stolen. It can be harnessed by anyone with the will and the means, so who knows. Maybe, once upon a time, the Old Stain wasn’t just some cosmic avatar of despair… maybe it wasn’t even the first ‘Entity’.

Turning away from the hook, I make my way towards my ultimate destination. The place where I always end up when I come back here to brood and be miserable by myself.

The basement.

Steps curl downward into a cramped room whose darkness is barely held at bay and I let out a relieved sigh as I take a deep breath of the blood-muddied air that constantly fills the room. Here the Fog is thickest, even if it’s not visible. The power inherent in the Fog saturates the walls, floor, ceiling, and the very substance of the room, and stepping into this place is like finally clearing my sinuses after descending a mountain’s worth of elevation.

Because this place is closest of all to the Old Stain’s realm.

“I could get back to you,” I say as start walking widdershins around the four-post shrine of hooks in the center of the basement. “There’s still a few drops of the old magic left in the book… I could do it.”

My little secret that no one knew. Sure, I’d played my last card in terms of my Journal, and sure it was basically just solid dark magic now, but there were still a few droplets of pure Equestrian magic left to it.

Enough to pass all the way through the Wall one last time.

I never told anyone that it still works for a very simple reason; because I am an unrepentant, cowardly hypocrite. Because if, one day, I just can’t take it anymore, it’s my way back to the one place that I know I still wants me.

The one place I know I belong.

It’s my final measure.

“No wonder Tempest left,” I say bitterly as I turn my back on the posts, swatting one of the hooks angrily as I do and sending it swinging with a deafening clatter.

“You’re a bitch,” I snarl as I glare at my reflection in the polished blades of my fingers, “and a worthless piece of cowardly shit, Sunset Shimmer!”

I didn’t deserve her. I don’t deserve any of them. They’ll all realise it eventually, just like Tempest did, but until then I have to do my damndest to keep them safe.

Whether or not I owe them my life, I owe them all that much.

I’m halfway up the stairs leading out of the basement when I hear someone knocking on my door.

I say knocking. Really it’s more like the metaphysical equivalent of someone gently tweaking my nose. That’s the other problem with this place: it’s not just a reflection of me, it’s an extension. I can sense everything in this pseudo-trial realm as if it were at my fingertips, so having someone go to the entrance and prod at it to get my attention can get irritating.

Good thing I already know who’s at the door.

“Why can’t people just let me be miserable in peace?” I grumble as I storm towards the Terminus and step into the bordering nothingness of the Fog.

I don’t emerge into the Everfree though. That’s not where she is.

“I knew you’d be here.”

I pause in the midlands of nowhere and sigh raggedly as Sonata Dusk, the kindest, gentlest, and silliest of my sisters congeals out of the Fog.

She looks now as I remember her looking back when I first met her, back when we were enemies, although here she looks a little older. She’s taller, and some of the softness is gone, replaced with limber beauty. Her face is full, though, and she’s smiling. She looks nothing like the gaunt, barely-there girl who’s asleep on the second floor of Canterlot General.

Here, Sonata’s raspberry eyes are sparkling and her arctic, two-tone, hair is lush and long and colorful.

The only thing that really marks her out is the old, outdated nurse’s blouse and long skirt she’s wearing that looks like it was pulled in from sometime circa seventeen-hundred.

“I guess you heard?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

I wrap my arms around myself and shudder.

“She left me, ‘Nata.” The words come out brittle and edged with tears. “She… She really left me.”

Her arms go around me, and Sonata pulls me into a gentle hug. I return it, burying my face—horrible as it is—against her shoulder as quiet, wracking sobs spill out of me.

No one, not Aria or Adagio or even Tempest, ever gets to see me like this.

No one but Sonata.

She kept my secret and helped me save a dozen souls from damnation two years ago. She scoured the aether for my wandering splinter of reality for time-beyond-reckoning just to light a little lamp of soul-burn to give me a beacon home.

It was Sonata who saved me.

Maybe she’s the one I owe my life to, then.

“You should put your claws away,” Sonata says as she pulls back, and I wipe at my cheeks with the backs of my hands. “You’ll feel better.”

“I won’t,” I say, a familiar spark of anger lighting in the back of my throat.

It’s petulant, I know, but Sonata endures it with her usual vapid patience. My temper just rolls right off of her, and it always has.

“Sunny,” Sonata says, her voice taking on an odd, cold quality. “I mean it.”

“Seriously, ‘Nata, it’s fine,” I snap. “I’m in my realm, okay? I’m not going to shed my skin in the middle of the Fog! That’s dangerous!”

“Not while I’m here,” she replies softly. “You know that.”

My fingers clash together as I grit my teeth. Sonata has never approved of how much I use my power. She doesn’t understand though. She and my other sisters? They have millennia worth of mental inertia giving them a foothold against the darkness. I can barely keep my head together on a good day!

“You know I’d never let the dark take you,” Sonata says, putting her hands in mine regardless of the sharp edges. “Just… put the knives away, okay, Sunny?”

“I said—” I spit through gritted teeth—“it’s fine.”

“It’s not,” Sonata replies, her tone hardening. “The Fog is making you cold and empty!”

“MAYBE I WANT TO BE COLD AND EMPTY!” I scream, my temper suddenly boiling over as all of my grief instantly ignites into rage. “MAYBE THAT’S FUCKING EASIER!”

Metal screams on metal as square my shoulders and flick my fingers, dragging the Fog to me as I turn my back on Sonata to return to my Trial.

“Sunset come back!” Sonata says, an edge of worry curling through her words. “Sunset! I’m really serious, okay?! You’re in danger! The Fog isn’t just energy, it’s memories! You can’t just soak in it like this!”

“I can do whatever I damn well want!” I snarl without looking back.

“NO!”

I’m almost to the Terminus when my body locks up. All of the power in me, all of the Fog, all of what makes me strong suddenly goes completely berserk as I spasm and jerk in place.

And behind me, Sonata drags in a ragged breath that rattles with sickening stridor.

Against my will, I’m dragged backward, and the Fog that forms my body starts to peel off of me like dead skin as I choke and gasp for breath. It feels like dying. Like drowning. Like someone is smothering me with a pillow in my bed as I lay helpless.

The force gripping me turns me back to face my sister, but the girl I knew is gone.

Sonata is stretching her hand towards me, curling her fingers into an arthritic claw. At the center of her palm is a flickering light like the last ember of a dying candle, and the Fog in me is being drawn to it like a moth.

But it’s costing her.

Her cheeks are sunken and her eyes are no longer glittering but gray with cataracts and cloaked by a veil of thin, dying hair while an ugly bruise forms in a break-neck ring around her throat.

“S-Son...n-nata… s-stop!” I choke the words out, but not for my sake

For hers.

She never uses her power full-tilt anymore and for good reason. She’s too weak. There’s not enough soul left to her. If Sonata were to fill all of that empty space with Fog then I don’t know if she’d ever really come back the way Adagio and I do.

“S-STOP IT!”

“Let. Go.” Sonata croaks through a neck that’s breaking in slow motion.

Her nurse’s blouse and skirt going are aging and rotting like a time-lapse; browning, and growing ragged as she tightens her grip.

She’s really doing this. She’s crazy.

“ST-TOP IT!” I wheeze. “IT… IT’LL T-TAKE YOU!”

Sonata’s grim eyes blaze with lambent, ghostly light as she clenches her fist harder, dragging more and more out of me. I can hear thunder in the distance. I can feel the claws of the Entity at our throats.

“Let—” she squeezes the words out between cracked lips and through an ever-constricting throat— “go!”

“FINE!”

I let go of my grip on the dreaming powers of the Nightmare and banish it all back to the Fog. Sonata staggers backward, suddenly bereft of anything to hold onto, her pallid and sunken features warping with confusion for a moment as the loss of her balance leaves her unsteady, but a moment later she finds her feet.

And slowly, my sister comes back.

Her face regains its pallor, her hair colors into its familiar arctic strand, like a breath of spring air, the age fades from Sonata’s clothing and takes all the sickness, cataracts, and bruising with it.

And I, Sunset Shimmer, fall to my knees in the Fog.

Sonata breathes out a heavy sigh of relief as she drops to her ass on the ground beside me and starts laughing and wheezing through winded lungs.

“Wow, Sunny, I really thought you were gonna let me do that for a second,” she says, grinning at me as she sits up.

“That was nuts,” I say, turning to glare at her. “You could’ve been lost, ‘Nata! Are you crazy?”

She smiles at me again. It’s a weird thing, her smile, and not in the common colloquial sense. I mean weird in the old way.

Wyrd. Fateful and knowing. Eldritch and strange.

There’s something subtly inhuman about her smile. Something fae and otherworldly that makes the expression feel somehow ominous more than comforting. That’s the real smile of Sonata Dusk, and I think she knows that’s what it looks like and that that’s why she smiles so vacuously all the time.

Better to look dumb than look wyrd.

“Crazy?” She laughs and nods. “Yeah! I think so!”

I can’t help but laugh with her as I collapse onto my back. It’s absurd. Completely absurd. Sonata just played chicken with her soul and she’s acting like it was nothing.

The all-pervasive grey of the Fog surrounds us as we laugh, and against my better judgment, I actually feel a little better. Maybe because Sonata reminded me just how far she was willing to go—how far my real family is willing to go—for me.

I shouldn’t need the reminder, and they shouldn’t feel like they have to prove that they’ll have my back but… it’s nice to be reminded.

Sonata turns onto her side as her fit of giggles dies down, and leans on her elbow as she faces me.

“Sorry.”

“For what?” Sonata asks.

I shake my head and gesture around us.

“For this,” I reply. “For being a brat… for always making things ten times harder than they have to be. And for not coming to visit you nearly as much I should.”

“I’m usually asleep anyway,” Sonata says with a chuckle. “Technically I still am.”

“You’re astral projecting,” I correct.

Sonata answers with a noncommittal shrug then reaches out to brush her fingers over my face, then up to push a few strands of red from my face.

“I miss the gold streaks,” Sonata says.

“Me too.”

I miss my original hair, but more than that I think I miss who I used to be. I miss being confident in my actions. I miss being strong. I miss being able to hold my head up high without having to prop my chin up on the blades of a Killer.

I miss me.

“Hey ‘Nata, can I tell you a secret?” I ask, turning over onto my side to face her properly.

“Another one?” She asks.

“Yeah.” I smile weakly. Sonata carries a few too many of my secrets. She’s stronger than anyone gives her credit for though.

“Sure.”

She puts her hand in mine, and I’m a little surprised at how small it is. Sonata has always been willowy, but you only really notice when she’s right next to you and quiet because her personality is so hard to miss. She’s a little like Pinkie Pie in that way, which I think is one of the reasons I like her.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” I say softly.

Sonata laughs quietly, then scoots closer and wraps her arms around me, pulling me into her arms and holding onto me while I curl up against her. She’s soft and warm, and here in the Fog she feels strong again. For some reason, Sonata is the only one that I feel like I can tell the whole truth to because I know she won’t judge me for it… it’s that wyrd that’s about her. Telling her the truth feels a little redundant because it’s almost like she already knows.

Who knows, maybe she does.

“You don’t have to do everything, Sunny,” she says quietly. “You can let us do some of the work.”

“Adagio wants more than just this, though,” I reply. “And so does Aria, even if she doesn’t say it. ‘Dagi and Timber want to get married… Aria wants to go on vacation with Redheart somewhere warm and maybe stay there… and I know that Sour and Starlight wish they could just live normal lives.”

Sonata nods along as she cards her fingers through my dyed, two-tone red hair, and sighs quietly.

“You don’t want a normal life?”

I laugh bitterly at that.

“What would I do with it?” I ask. “I’m dead and buried, remember?”

“You could go somewhere else,” Sonata suggests. “Maybe start a new life, go to university, get a job, find a nice girl, and settle down with a family.”

“Maybe have two-point-five kids, a dog, a cat, and a white picket fence while I’m at it?” I ask blithely.

“Why not?” Sonata asks with a grin.

“Because I’m a monster, ‘Nata,” I reply. “Nothing can change that… I drank from the Old Stain’s cup and now, whether I like it or not, that’s just what I am now.”

“So what?” Sonata pulls me a little closer and buries her face in my hair, pressing her lips to the crown of my head as she smiles. “We’re all monsters here.”

Considering the poor set of cards that Sonata’s life has dealt to her over her many, many years, it’s a little intimidating how unassailable her good cheer is.

That said…

“Rainbow Dash is one of us too,” I say, and Sonata draws back from me and looks down with wide eyes.

“She’s…?” Sonata nods around to the Fog.

“Yeah,” I say. “A Killer, and a real one, not like the Legion. The Stain made her, probably before the Thief stole Its power, but the weird thing is that she’s on our side… kind of. She says she’s working with another Killer, one that the Stain sent through to reclaim what the Thief took, I don’t know who it is but Rainbow says they’re both going to work with us to bring down the Legion, that gunslinger, and the Thief.”

With the backing of the Entity, we might actually have a shot of coming out of this without losing anyone. Two more Killers on our side meant that we were one for one against the Legion and their handler, and better yet, our Killers would be fully-fledged. The newblood Legion can barely keep their heads on straight in combat, so between me, Adagio, Rainbow, and her mysterious ally, we’ve got the advantage.

The only wild card now is the Thief themselves, but I’m willing to bet that they can’t act directly. With the theft of the Entity’s powers came all the same rules and laws that bind that thing to its realm. If the Thief were capable of reaping its own power, then they would certainly be doing that. The fact that they’re acting through intermediaries suggests that while they can manipulate the Fog, conjure hooks, and even potentially create Trials, they can’t kill anyone.

Not with their power anyway.

“Do you trust her?” Sonata asks.

Do I trust Rainbow Dash? That is a loaded question. Do I trust the girl I used to think might be my girlfriend one day only to have that particular dream met the cold, hard truth of reality in a head-on collision?

The simple and unpleasant truth, though, is: “Yeah… I do.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s too stupid to lie,” I say with a small, bitter laugh.

That is the clear and unvarnished truth. I trust what Rainbow Dash says not because I like her, but because I know her, and I know that she’s too thick to try and pull one over one me. For better or worse, she’s just too bald-faced with her emotions.

Sonata chuckles, and nods, then stiffens for a moment before relaxing and looking down at me.

“Hey, Sunny.”

“Hm?”

“Aria is with me and she needs to talk to us,” she says quietly.

I sigh against Sonata’s shoulder, then groan as I hug her tighter. Aria and I have some things we need to unpack, namely some things regarding a certain ex-friend of mine, but just because it needs to happen doesn’t mean I’m looking forward to it.

“Do we have to?” I ask.

“Probably.”

I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave the Fog and go back to the place where Sonata’s real body is. It’s half the reason I find excuses not to visit her more often. I hate seeing Sonata like she is now. I much prefer her this way… the way I remember her.

“Okay,” I say as I sit up begrudgingly. “Thanks for talking me down, ‘Nata… sorry you had to go that far.”

Sonata shakes her head as she sits up beside me.

“Don’t be sorry, silly,” she says, nudging my side gently with her elbow. “You’re my sister. I love you.”

I swallow back a thick lump in my throat as I nod and lean to the side to rest my head on her shoulder.

“I know,” I say shakily. “I love you too.”

Together, we stand up, and Sonata holds out her hand to me. I take it and she smiles that odd, wyrd smile of hers as she raises her other hand out towards the nothingness of the Fog.

“Hold on tight.”

I nod as Sonata tightens her grip on that nothingness, invoking that dead-ember flame in her palm and grasps a point in space that’s far from here, and in an instant, the shadow of the Killer she used to be falls over her.

Sunken, hollow cheeks. Empty eyes. Cracked lips.

With a scream choked by a rattling stridor, Sonata rips the Fog apart and whisks us both towards Canterlot General.

Author's Note

She searches where others will not go... and sees what others will not see.

Support me on my Patreon where you can check out chapters of my original novel, Bare Knuckles & Butterflies, as they're released!

1.16

Teleportation is rarely a comfortable form of travel, even in Equestria. Not only that, but the power expenditure required to go any significant distance is so absurd that it requires multiple unicorns to teleport one average pony as little as one town over.

That, of course, is only in respect to teleporting directly because what I will tenuously call the more ‘energy-efficient’ means of teleportation aren't really teleporting at all. Most of them involve stepping sideways, taking a short jaunt through hell, and them popping out on the other end.

Or in Sonata’s case, taking a brief skip directly under the Old Stain’s left nostril.

My ears are left ringing with the choking scream of Sonata’s cry as I land shakily on the sterile tile floors of Canterlot General, coughing and hacking as I try to wash the taste of ash off my tongue while I stumble out of the corner of the room.

“Hey Red.” Aria sits up in her chair and tosses the beat-up harlequin romance she was reading onto the end table. “Glad ‘Nata was able to find you, I couldn’t get you on your cell.”

“Yeah, the Dreamtime doesn’t get great reception,” I say perhaps a little more gruffly than I need to as I wipe my hands on my jacket. “What’s up?”

My tone puts a pause on Aria's normal banter, and she stares for a moment before continuing. Her previously relaxed posture is gone, replaced by tension in her shoulders and a wary expression.

“I uh… I wanted to talk to you about Tempest.”

“You and everyone else,” I snap. “So let me save you some time. Tempest is gone and per usual I’m the one that drove her away! She’s done fighting and that’s it, is that all you wanted?”

Aria stares at me for a long moment before standing up and nodding at the door as she shoves her hands in the pockets of her white coat. I flick my gaze down to Sonata who’s lying supine on the bed, her hale and healthy mental projection replaced by the shadow of her physical body.

Her cheeks are gaunt and sunken, and her eyes are half-closed and surrounded by hollow, bruised bags while her two-tone arctic hair is pooled thinly around her,

I reach out and brush a few fingers over her cheek, and she shifts to look up at me.

“Thank you,” I say softly.

She doesn’t speak. That much is beyond her most of the time, but she does nod, and I smile faintly as I draw back and move toward Aria. If there was one thing I’d give up everything for, it would be to make Sonata whole again. My sister is forever hanging between life and death, her soul irrevocably damaged by the touch of the Old Stain when it brought her Killer side to life.

I pass Aria who steps between Sonata and I to whisper something gentle before she fixes a modified oxygen mask over her face and tucks the blankets a little more closely around her.

Out in the hall of MedSurg, it’s quiet. At this time of night, there’s only the odd nurse walking the halls, checking in now and again on certain at-risk patients.

“What’s going on, Red?” Aria asks as she shuts the door to Sonata’s room. “If it’s about Tempest—”

“Fuck Tempest,” I hiss as I jerk a finger under her nose. “You knew.”

“Knew what?!” Aria puts her hands up as she takes a step back.

“Rainbow Dash!”

The color and defiance drains from Aria’s face as she glances around, then sighs and gestures for me to follow her. We walk for a while toward what I recognise as a small break room adjoining the hall. It’s empty, unsurprisingly. There aren’t enough nurses to make use of it tonight, or most nights. For being such a large hospital the place is perennially understaffed in terms of medical personnel, so most nurses just stay at their stations, even on their breaks.

“It wasn’t like I tried to hide it,” Aria says as she closes the door behind me and I drop into one of the chairs.

“Horseshit.”

Aria turns and glares at me for a moment, then the expression fades and she shakes her head as she sits down across from me.

“Seriously, it happened over a year ago,” Aria says. “It was before even you came back, and once she was discharged I put it outta my mind, okay? Even after you came back I didn’t think about it until months had passed and by that point why should I bother? We both know how you get around that bluebell bitch!”

“You should have told me anyway,” I say tightly. “Now, tell me what happened!”

Her chair creaks as Aria leans back, puts her fingers to her temple, and she lets out a low groan, then shrugs.

“Fine, fuck doctor-patient confidentiality, I guess,” she grumbles.

“She came in covered in open cuts—self-inflicted—along with a bunch of fresh track marks, and bloodwork so full of heroin that it would’ve made a rock star raise their eyebrows.”

Aria listed off the damage as if it were routine, and although I knew the story wasn’t going to be pretty just from having seen the state of Rainbow’s body, it still took me off guard.

“Her friend, the cute, squeaky one?”

“—Fluttershy—”

—yeah, she’s the one who called it in,” Aria continues. “But look, I never talked about it because it happened a while ago and you have enough trouble controlling your temper as it is, Red!”

“I—!”

Aria crosses her arms over her chest and gives me an arch look as I struggle to get my boiling rage under control. She has a point but she doesn’t have to be so damn smug about it. So I have a temper problem! Back in Equestria I was a pyrothurge! Having a temper isn’t just a tendency it’s practically a prerequisite!

“Yeah well, turns out there was a… development,” I say thinly through gritted teeth,

The expression of smugness melts away to concern, and Aria sits up a little straighter.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I lean back in my chair again and rub at my face. “So you know how all of the Survivors who came out of the Trials are twisted up, right? Rainbow carried some of it out too.”

“Okay, and?” Aria asks, leaning forward.

“And apparently she was so miserable that the Old Stain noticed her, except he didn’t grab her! He turned her!” I finish.

Aria stares for a moment as the pieces click together, then she blanches as the coin drops. She puts a hand up to her lips and from the way her eyes are flicking back and forth I can practically see the lines being drawn in her mind. She’s making the same connections I did a while ago.

“Which… which one is she?” Aria asks hollowly.

“The Narc,” I reply coldly. “Except she calls herself ‘The Blight’, and she’s a real fuckin’ monster, Ari’.”

“Did you kill her?”

And there is the sixty billion double-bit question. Although maybe a better one would be should I have killed her? She’s one of the Old Stain’s priests now. Rainbow, like me, is a Fogborn Killer, trueborn to the sole master of the Fog, but unlike me, she doesn’t seem to have an issue with it.

The Entity is the Father of all Killers, except Rainbow seems to have a pretty loose relationship with It. She’s acting more like an employee to a manager that she sort of likes and would probably have a beer with, but otherwise doesn’t associate with outside of work.

Leave it to Rainbow to treat the mutation of her body and soul like getting a seasonal job.

“No, I made a deal,” I say.

Aria’s jaw clicks open.

“We’re outnumbered so badly it’s actually hilarious,” I continue tensely. “Rainbow and whatever other Killer the Old Stain shunted through the Wall between here and there are hunting the Thief, not us, okay? So yeah, we’re allies now, and unfortunately, we’re all going to have to get used to it.”

“A...Allies?” Aria spits. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, did you have a better plan?” I ask, gesturing out toward Canterlot. “Because last I checked we were getting our asses handed to us!”

“So you’re going back to the Entity!”

“I’m not going anywhere!” I snarl. “I’m taking what’s offered because it’s the only option we have!”

Aria stands and starts pacing, a look of absolute disbelief on her face as she walks back and forth between the walls of the cramped break room before finally stopping in front of me.

“And did it occur to you to ask any of us what we thought of this?” Aria’s tone is tight with rage, and I stand up to face her as she starts to shake.

“Yeah, it did,” I say quietly. “But it was the only choice, Ari’, and like I told you back in the basement of my Trial…” I lean in to meet her gaze evenly. “I’m not better than this, got it? I’ll do whatever I have to if it means saving you all.”

Of all of us who walked out of the Trial and thumbed our noses at the Old Stain, the closest pairs were Starlight and Sour Sweet, and Aria and I. No one could match the rapport that we shared with our partners, not even Tempest and I—before she split—were on the same wavelength.

Give me a choice between every weapon and spell in the world and an army to back it up, and having Aria Blaze at my back, and I’ll take Aria every single time.

She and I? We’re unstoppable.

That's why the look of betrayal on her face hurts so much.

“This is nuts, Red,” Aria hisses.

“It’s the only play, Ari’.”

She grits her teeth and crosses the room in a flash, grabs me by the collar of my shirt and drags me up into her face.

“On Noden's Oath if you weren’t my sister…” Aria snarls then turns her head to spit on the ground before looking back at me. “What happens when this goes south, huh? You think the Entity is going to be happy letting you go on your merry once he’s spit-roasted the Thief on those claws of his?”

I don’t move or resist, I let her handle me. She can’t hurt me if she wanted to, and even now, with her hands at my throat, it’s a little satisfying to note that my Killer instincts aren’t boiling up.

Not even my Nightmare side believes that Aria will really hurt me.

“Do you trust me?” I ask.

“You got some real fuckin’ nerve asking me that now, Red,” Aria snaps.

“Do you. Trust me.”

I say the words slowly, never looking away from her. Aria’s glare is incandescent. I can feel her hands shaking, and I get it. I really, really do.

“You know what happens if that Thing wins?” Aria demands. “It’s not just you! Even if that cosmic skidmark ignores the rest of us Survivors, if it wins then I lose every single one of my sisters!”

“I know,” I say quietly. “So do you trust me?”

Aria’s eyes are red and her whole body is wracked with shudders as tears well at the edges of her eyes. I can tell how scared she is. It’s her one great fear: losing her family. She lived that fear once in the Trials of the Entity when Sonata, then Adagio, fell to despair and were turned into monstrous Killers that hunted her for their new master, but against all odds she’d gotten them both back.

And now, here I am putting them at risk again. I’m taking a devil’s deal just because it’s the devil I know because I’m not sure I can win this fight against all these odds.

Well, not without sacrifices, and I’m not losing any of my family either.

“You know I do, Red,” Aria sobs.

“Then trust that I’ll get us out of this,” I reply as I get my feet under me and wrap my arms around Aria.

“This isn’t like the Trial,” Aria says as she lets go of me and rests her forehead against my shoulder. “The Entity knows the score. It knows we’re against it.”

She’s right. The last time we only got out of the Trial because the Entity didn’t know that Adagio and Sonata had gone turncoat. It didn’t know that I’d stacked the deck just enough to put his loyal Killers out of commission with a few well-placed knives to the back from their erstwhile allies.

Now, though, that ace is played. I don’t have anyone behind enemy lines to cause havoc, I don’t even have Equestrian magic to counteract the Old Stain’s darkness anymore.

“Tell me you have a plan.” There’s a note of pleading to her voice that’s nothing like her usual grim confidence.

Aria is older than me by orders of magnitude, but she’s also nothing like she has been for most of her life. After spending so long as the only magical being in a world full of mundanity, and then coming up against something that had the same distance in age and scope between her and it as she did with me, must be terrifying.

“I have… a gamble.”

Bitter laughter spills from Aria as she straightens out, shakes her head, then steps back while she looks me over with red eyes.

“For you, Red,”—she grips both of my shoulders tightly—“that amounts to the same thing.”

She’s not wrong there.

“So what do we do?” she asks.

I brush the wrinkles from my jacket and smile as I tug it straight. I may not have a lot, but I have Aria and Adagio and Sonata, I have my sisters. I have Sour Sweet and Starlight Glimmer and Redheart, my friends.

“Get everyone together,” I say. “Tell’em the score.”

“And then?”

I snort out a quiet laugh as I put a hand on Aria's shoulder and give her my best 'Discord-May-Care' smirk.

"Then—" I give her shoulder a squeeze "—we go gravedigging."

I wonder if I’m a coward for foisting off breaking the news that Rainbow is not only one of the Killer’s we’ve been tracking for months, but also our latest ally, onto Aria.

Redheart will take it better from her, though, and that’s probably true of Sour and Starlight. Adagio won’t balk at it, even if it wrong-foots her. I know her well enough to know that she’s no stranger to odd bedfellows when needs must. If Tempest were still with us I’d tell her myself, but that’s not an issue anymore.

I try not to think too hard on that.

Tempest was my rock for a solid year, but in all that time I think all I ever did was use her to prop myself up. Now she’s gone and, honestly, that’s probably a good thing.

For her, I mean.

It’s probably pretty bad for me.

The night I met Zephyr and fought the Legion was the last night I had projected my mind into the Dream. Now I’m fully manifesting, even though I know it’s risky.

Already it’s getting harder to control my temper and my instincts around normal people, and it was hard enough when I was keeping a distance between myself and the Nightmare and had Tempest to lean on. Now I have neither fallback. I was tits deep in darkness and getting ready to dive.

By the end of all this, I’ll be lucky if I'm still sane.

The Fog of the Dreamtime ripples as I flicker through the edges of Canterlot until I find the spot I’m looking for, and congeal out onto the roof. The building is old, like a lot of buildings in this part of town, and I make a quick scan of the area, skimming it for thoughts, before forcing myself fully into the Real, shedding my Killer skin, and tugging my phone out of my pocket.

//Ninth Precinct, homicide, right?// I shoot the text off to Aria as I look around for the roof access.

//Yeah, the call was made by his partner, Shining Armor.//

//Thanks//

I drop my phone back into my pocket and shift back into the Dream, weaving my power through the Fog and down, down, down, into the exhaustion-riddled minds of the police officers below me. So many of them were running on caffeine and uppers, and homicide had it the worst. With three purported serial killers on the loose, no good leads, and now an officer down to the one killer with a penchant for offing drug dealers, things are probably looking pretty grim.

Although knowing Canterlot, they’ll probably frame the late Detective Sterling’s death as some kind of heroic stand against the Narc while said killer was about to off some imaginary street dealer they’ll make up for the narrative.

Canterlot cops aren’t the worst in the world but… they’re still cops.

Homicide is easy enough to find. It’s the worst hit bunch out of a bad lot. I take a grip on the weary minds inside that part of the building and use them to slingshot myself through the walls and doors and barriers of the Ninth Precinct Canterlot Police Department.

My feet hit the old marble tiles of the floor and I immediately pin myself to the wall as the flurry of activity resolves itself around me. Detectives, beat cops, pencil pushers; anyone and everyone who makes the wheels go round in this precinct are running pell-mell and probably have been since Sterling turned up dead.

Voices and thoughts are a slurry of meaningless chatter in my ears. I can’t resolve any of it because I can’t focus on it. I don’t know enough about these people to get their thoughts in order, but I do know one of them.

At least a little bit.

I know his name, and that’s enough.

Shining Armor.

There’s a lot of lore about names and magic, but honestly? Unless you’re some kind of warlock who specialises in the ridiculously esoteric art of Naming magic, a witch who knows some really specific curses, or a literal daemon, then names are not all they’re cracked up to be.

Really, names have only one major use in magic, and that’s ‘Finder’ spells. If you’re trying to find something or someone, then the name of that thing or person is the best way to do it, hooves down.

So I focus on it. I use it like a keyword in a search engine, inserting it into my thoughts and from there into the world around me, filtering out the clamor until it’s just Shining’s name on repeat.

Shining Armor… Shining Armor… Shining Armor…

I follow the whispers through the precinct until I finally reach a small office with two occupants.

One is Shining Armor, I know him because I can feel his mind. This is one I’ve been looking for. The other is an older man, a captain by his rank pins, with dark, auburn hair, a complexion not unlike the marble tiles I’m standing on, all on a six-foot-plus frame.

“Go home, Detective,” the older man says gruffly, his voice oddly distant in Fog. “You’ve been here practically twenty-four-seven since what happened at Serenity, and you need to get some sleep.”

“I’ve slept, Captain,” Shining says.

Liar.

I can feel the tight grip of exhaustion closing in a vice around his skull from here. It wouldn’t take more than a slight push to nudge him off to dreamland.

“I mean real sleep, Armor.” The captain puts a thick finger up to point directly at Shining’s face. “Go home, crawl into bed with your pretty wife, and get some goddamn sleep, okay? You won’t do Sterling any favors burning yourself out.”

Normally the mind of a cop is a firm and unyielding thing. It’s not easy to push through the barriers of someone with a rigid mindset, but the more tired they are, the easier it is for me to get in, and Shining’s mind is like a fortress with its walls crumbling and the door hanging off its hinges.

Stalwart Stand… that’s the captain’s name. A good man by Shining’s estimation. A decent cop—one of the few—who's never been compromised and has always put the people in his area first.

A good gear in a broken system… the poor bastard.

Stalwart gives Shining the stink-eye for another half-second before nodding and turning to leave the cramped little office.

The moment he’s out, I turn back to Shining and sigh quietly.

“That’s rough,” I say softly. “Losing someone like that? Even if he was a dirty cop, it always feels bad to lose. And the worst part is that you’re not going to catch her… and on the very, very slim chance that you do, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”

Rainbow probably wouldn’t kill Shining. Not unless he was dirty too, which I doubted. Something about the jawline this guy is sporting, I think.

No, I’d bet my bottom bit this guy is clean as a whistle.

I watch him for a few more moments as he shifts through case files. It’s actually a little sad, watching him like this. I can feel the exhaustion and frustration bleeding off of him. He’s angry, not just at the killers but at himself.

“I feel you,” I say quietly. “But this isn’t a matter for humans anymore.”

It never was.

“Let the monsters kill each other, Detective.”

My claws press painlessly into his forehead before sinking into this mind to send Detective Shining Armor spiraling down into slumber on the heels of euphoric laughter that bubbles up from my chest.

I follow him down, riding the riptide of his sleeping soul into his private bubble of Dreamtime.

Everyone dreams in a different way, but there are small generalities that tend to hold true across the board. The main common ground is that people’s minds tend to retreat to their most comfortable places, which really backfires when you have a nightmare because that means something awful is happening in a place where you normally feel comfortable.

Not always, though.

Some minds, like Shining Armor’s, apparently, will be drawn towards places of pain and obsession.

My boots strike hard tile and, for a moment, I have to reorient myself because it doesn’t look like I’ve moved.

“Wow,” I mutter as I look around the dream-version of Shining’s office. “You even work in your sleep?”

I turn to regard Shining Armor who’s sitting at his desk which is far larger and wider than his real one. Scattered across the hardwood surface are dozens of case files, crime scene photos, witness statements, and all of the other paraphernalia a Detective would need to solve a case.

This is exactly what I wanted, though. A homicide detective might be assigned to a particular case, but realistically speaking there’s no way he doesn’t have his fingers in the pies of the other detectives dealing with the Legion and the Ogre of the East. I just thought it would be a lot harder to find the information, but I suppose in retrospect, all of this must be pretty close to the surface of his mind.

In reality, I know I should’ve explored this avenue earlier, but I just didn’t think about it. Partially that was because, until recently, I didn’t even know which, if any, of the crop of serial killers we’d been chasing down were Fogborn. Now, though, I knew what I was looking for, and while the Narc wasn’t going to be a target on my list for the time being thanks to our uneasy alliance, I needed all the information I could dredge up about the Legion and the Ogre.

“Let’s see what we’re working with here.” I bend over Shining’s shoulder to peer at some of the case files.

They’re meticulously organised, which doesn’t surprise me.

What does surprise me is when Shining picks up a picture from the Narc’s file, and it’s one that I don’t recognise. A girl named Tallymark. From the date, I guess she must have been recently identified, or maybe she’s just one that had been overlooked. Either way, I lean in to get a better look at the new victim.

Detective Armor holds up the picture, grimaces at it for a moment, then lowers it, and lying in the middle of his office, right in front of his desk, is the body of the girl.

“Wow,” I mumble as I step back and frown. “You really did a number on that girl, Dash.”

She’s got lime green hair with an undercut, a gray complexion, and from what I can tell she’s probably about five feet and some loose change. The night she died she left her home in an outfit that looks like the first search return you’d get if you looked up ‘goth-punk chic’, but the night ended with her looking significantly less attractive.

Her skin is pallid and drawn and her mouth and chin are stained with vomit. What were once soft, full cheeks are sunken and hollow, while her eyes are rolled back in their sockets. Tallymark’s small, delicate hands are curled into thin, arthritic claws, and her jaw is hanging open in a silent, endless scream.

Shining had obviously been on site for the real deal. No way his imagination conjured up these details. This is the kind of thing that burns itself into your mind, which it obviously did.

Seeing it like this shows something that the photograph of the body couldn’t quite convey. It’s something about the way her face is twisted just so, and the strain imprinted on her features at the moment of her death. Whatever it is, whatever Rainbow did to that girl the night she killed her, I know that Tallymark died screaming.

“You enjoyed this.” Stepping away from the desk and walking over to the corpse, I look down over the dead girl. “Rainbow… how far gone are you if this is how you started?”

As sickening as it is, a small part of me is satisfied at the knowledge that Rainbow never forgot about me. Kneeling down by the corpse, I brush my fingers over Tallymark’s warped face, and then down to the puncture mark just below her right breast.

Whether or not she knows it, the hate I inflicted on Rainbow back in my Trial is still in her. It’s still eating away at her like a slow, corrosive venom, chewing at her bones and heart and soul.

The corpse flickers before I can look over it further, and I glance up at Shining just as he picks up another photograph.

In an instant, the body of Tallymark is replaced by what I can best describe as a red slurry.

“OH GROSS!”

I stumble back as my knees where I’d been kneeling are suddenly soaked. A monster I may be, but I can’t look at that mess too long without feeling my gorge rise, and I turn away. That would be one of the Ogre—or rather the Oni’s—kills, it bore all the hallmarks of that thing’s unrelenting savagery.

“Not much to see there,” I mutter as I try to scrape some of the victim off of my trousers.

Unlike the body of Tallymark, there are no signs at all that the Oni enjoyed their work. This kind of brutality speaks to me of barely conscious action. This poor bastard doesn’t look like he was murdered, he looks like he got hit by a semi.

“I guess Billy probably would’ve left us looking pretty similar if we weren’t modified by the Entity,” I muse quietly as I turn back to Shining’s desk and try not to look back at the middle of the room.

What I really need is something specific on the Legion, though, since it’s pretty clear now that there’s no love lost between the Thief and the Oni.

For all I know, the Oni is a rogue agent. Maybe it’s serving the Old Stain… maybe. My gut says no, though. If that were the case, it would have a purpose, like Rainbow Dash. Rainbow is gathering Fog to try and make up for the power the Entity invested into my reality marble before I stole it, and whoever this new Killer is that Rainbow is working with is supposed to not only collect the Fog but deal with the Thief as well.

The Oni isn’t doing anything but wreaking havoc, which would make sense as a servant of the Old Stain if it were going after Legion, but that’s not the case. As near as I can tell, it only picked a fight with Legion when those three tried to poach on its turf. If anything, the Oni is more like a territorial apex predator than a capital ‘K’ Killer.

As troubling as that is, it does make them less of an immediate threat making them a comfortably tertiary problem that I can deal with once I’ve dealt with the main issue.

Back to the Legion, then.

I look over the swathe of photos pertaining to the trio while Shining continues to torment himself beside me. Why people do that I’ll never understand, but more power to them, I guess. I suppose it is his job, even if it is an exercise in futility.

“I’ll take care of this, Detective,” I say quietly as Shining Armor dreams of the dead. “Just give me some time, and then you’ll be able to get some sleep that’s finally free of nightmares.”

The Legion’s activities are collected with an expert hand here, and the signs of care are the same across the board meaning that, although he isn’t assigned to the Legion case officially, I’d be willing to bet that Shining had been the one to collate all of this data for his colleagues. He has a sharp, tactical mind… he’d have made a fine general a century ago.

All of the murders I’ve studied are here, but there’s more than that.

A grin etches its way onto my face.

Much more.

The Legion aren’t just murderers. They’re vandals. They tend to leave destruction in their wake regardless of where they go but that’s a hell of a lot harder for one person to track down in a city as big as Canterlot, especially when your quarry can move through the Fog practically at will. The grim fact of the matter is that murders are easy to find because they’re loud. Finding the vandalism and other signs of the Legion’s passage requires more boots on the ground than I’ve got.

But the Canterlot PD’s bloated budget means it’s got plenty of beat cops to do that for me.

The fact that I never considered this angle is galling. It should have been obvious, and I could have made progress so much faster, but regrets are for the living, and they do me no good now.

I scan the marks and reports. Dates, times, addresses; they all overlay in my mind like a three-dimensional map of the city. I can memorise the data now, such as it is, and collate it with what I know of their Fog-treading.

“Done,” I say as I look up from the mass of files to Shining Armor who’s kneeling over another corpse.

This one I recognise because I saw it just days ago on a slab in the morgue.

Sterling Standard.

Shining Armor is crouched over the body, staring down into the ruined face. The coroner over at Canterlot General must’ve done some touch-up work because even as broken as old Sterling looked in the morgue, he didn’t look nearly this bad.

Maybe it’s just the distortion of the nightmare. That and in Shining’s dreaming memories, the body is still fresh. I try not to look too closely at the gory remains as I join Shining at Sterling’s side, and crouch down beside them both.

“I’ll end this, Detective,” I say softly. “I promise.”

The coherency of the dream flickers minutely, and Shining Armor frowns, and his brow furrows like he’s fighting off a sudden headache.

Then he looks up, squints, and focuses blearily on me.

I have to admit. I’m impressed. Even as tired as he is, a part of his mind recognises my intrusion and it’s trying to alert him to it. To tell him that someone is in his mind who ought not to be. Most likely, his perception of me is just a hazy blur of color and shape—like the background of a dreamscape—but the fact that he sees me at all speaks volumes of his strength of will and character.

“Who are you?” He slurs, his mind still caught between the dream and the real.

I shake my head and chuckle.

“Just a bad dream, Detective,” I reply as I reach out and slice my claws in the fabric of his nightmare. “Now do yourself a favor… and get some sleep.”

The nightmare collapses, and Shining Armor’s mind falls into the dreamless dark of slumber. With as strong as his mind is, I wouldn’t be surprised if his next REM cycle rebuilt the nightmare, but at least this will buy him a few hours of true rest.

He deserves it.

As for me? I’ve got a grave to dig up and a map to build.

Author's Note

Leave nothing unchecked, there is much to be found in forgotten places.

Support me on my Patreon where you can check out chapters of my original novel, Bare Knuckles & Butterflies, as they're released!

1.17

Even I have to sleep sometime.

It’s not what I would call restful sleep. Or even real sleep in the strictest sense of the term, but I do have to sleep. It’s much the same as the way sleep happened in the Trials, once we got back around the campfire after a run-in with the Killer du jour and we would collapse into a half-sleep that kept us alert but always left a kind of leadness in our limbs.

Ironically, what characterises my own sleep is the most unsettling thing of all for me.

I don’t dream.

Maybe it’s some quirk of my nature, but going to sleep for me is more like getting knocked unconscious in the Hollywood sense. Once I get tired enough, I find a place to rest, lay my head down, and just… black out.

Wherever it is my mind goes, there’s nothing there. Just endless dark. I’m not even really aware of it until I wake up and have that unsettling feeling of having been somewhere else that I can’t quite account for, even knowing it’s not true.

I know it’s not true because it used to be that the only place I felt safe enough to sleep in was our apartment, and only when Tempest was home and could hold on to me. Otherwise, an irrational part of my mind was absolutely convinced that I’d close my eyes, then open them and be back in the grip of the Old Stain… cradled in those chitinous claws as it takes me apart, bit by traitorous bit, extracting all the parts of me that aren’t the obedient daughter and loyal priest.

Like I said… irrational.

If that thing was capable of pulling me back into its embrace so easily, it would have done it a long time ago.

Still, the notion of falling asleep terrifies me. It’s not insomnia—I will fall asleep eventually—but it is a completely irrational terror.

There’s a certain irony in being a somniphobic dream demon.

“Bayu bayushki bayu... ne lozhisya na krayu...”

My eyes snap open and consciousness floods into me in an adrenal rush that sends me jerking upright, and that fades only as I recognise the soft, insistent voice singing beside me.

“Sleeping here? Really?” Adagio asks as I rub at my eyes before shooting her a glare. “Isn’t that a little risky, dear?”

Sitting up from the long desk I’d fallen asleep on top of, I roll my neck and relish the series of cracks that come in reply. Adagio is seated on top of a student’s desk with her wood-ax propped up on the wall near the door to the classroom and her hatchets secured to an old infantry belt strapped around her chest. The familiar hare-faced half-mask is settled squarely at Adagio's hip, and she rests a hand on it as she watches me.

“Is there a problem?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer. She just stares at me for a long moment, her dark eyes reading me more deeply than I care to be read at the moment.

“You have a bed, you know,” she says quietly.

No, Tempest and I had a bed. Now I have a mattress that’s stuffed with memories of betrayal that poisons every single night we spent curled up together talking, watching movies, or making love.

I don’t say that, though.

“I’m more comfortable here,” I reply, nodding around us.

The blood-rich stink of copper and ashes that fill the Fog fills my Trial too. I’d come back here after I’d gotten what I’d needed from the Ninth Precinct and the mind of a certain Detective to try and get some sleep before cobbling a map together.

“Starlight and Sour are worried about you,” Adagio continues.

“I’m fine,” I say through gritted teeth. “They’re the mortal ones, let them worry about each other. I’ll live.”

For certain definitions of the word.

Adagio shakes her head, and for a moment I can’t help but hate how motherly she can get at times. There’s a reason her nickname quietly became ‘Momdagio’ around the rest of us.

“You’re not invincible,” Adagio says.

“And I’m not made of glass either!” I snap. “Yeah, Tempest leaving me fucking hurt, okay? But people out in Canterlot are dying and that means my hurt feelings can come later! Now did you find that fucking grave or not?”

Adagio meets my glare pound for pound until finally, I look away, an ugly coil of guilt and rage tightening around my throat as I fix my eyes on the ground.

“One day,” Adagio starts, “you’re going to lash out, and you’re really going to hurt someone, Sunset, and it will probably be someone who tried to be close to you.”

“I’m aware.”

“Being aware isn’t enough!” Adagio stands up sharply, stalks the two quick steps between us, and seizes me by the throat.

A dull croak escapes my lips as she jerks me up into the air.

Shock rolls over me as she hefts me, one-armed, over her head. Eyes that are swallowed by blackness—the eyes of the Huntress—stare up at me with cold malice. Fury swallows my vision as my skin warps to red, ice floods my veins, and blades sprout from my fingers.

My teeth notch to sharpened points and my jacket flows out to the flapping black coat of my Killer form, but before I strike her she whirls about, tossing me like a ragdoll and driving me to the ground where she pins me with a closed fist as the air is driven from my lungs.

“Being aware,” she hisses, “just means you know that you’re going to hurt the people you love before you do it, and that’s not an improvement! And Killers like you and I can’t afford that kind of slip.”

Eyes of black bore into me. My fever-hot breath is boiling in my lungs and all I want to do is fight! I want to slice and cut! I want to drag her screaming into my Nightmare where I’m the Goddess and I’m in control!

“Then take me out if I'm such a danger!” I spit. “You promised.”

Adagio snorts then shakes her head as she lets go of my neck and stands straight before holding out a hand.

“Neither of us are finished with our work yet,” Adagio says blithely.

I glare up at her before sullenly reaching out with my clawed hand and taking a grip, palm to palm, careful to avoid giving her an extreme manicure. Adagio tightens her hold and heaves me to my feet. The P.A. system above us crackles with half-heard snippets of tinny music as I brush the dust from my coat before looking back to my sister.

“So?” I ask bitterly. “Did you find it?”

Adagio shrugs.

“It took some doing,” she admits. “I had to go to the funeral home where the break-in happened and track forward from there, and there wasn’t much to go off of.”

“How did you get into the funeral home?” I ask, giving Adagio an arch look.

She smirks at me, showing her teeth in a predator’s grin.

“The same way I got in here, sister,” she replies easily.

I raise an eyebrow at that. It wasn’t the answer I was expecting. I expected her to have lied her way in, not brute-forced her way through the walls between dimensions.

“You hate walking the Fog,” I say.

“If you think that, then you mistake me, Sunset,” she says quietly, earning a faint frown from me. “I stay out because it feels too natural… because I feel at home there, that’s all.”

That shouldn’t have been something she needed to tell me, but it surprises me all the same. The Fog is home for us. For Killers. It’s where we were born and where we were meant to live. I don’t know if our kind can ever truly die, but if we do, then I know in my bones that the Fog is where we’re supposed to do it.

“Okay,” I say quietly. “So what happened?”

Adagio shakes her head.

“It happened a while ago, so the traces were faint, but they were still there. Faint traces of something touched by the Fog. I found the records too, though. There were sections that had been removed. Other sections had clearly been changed.”

I frown. “What’s that mean?”

“That means,” Adagio replies, “that I’m not sure the family even knows what they buried.”

My eyebrows arch up past my hairline.

“My guess is that the funeral home advised a closed casket to cover up what was taken,” Adagio continues softly. “The break-in happened after the family had identified the body, so they may not have questioned it. And no parent wants to…”

My jaw tightens at the expression of grief that crosses Adagio’s face briefly before she masters herself and returns to the matter at hand. To this day, I don’t know how she does it; how she goes on knowing that her daughter is three centuries dead.

“But we have to know for sure.”

Adagio nods.

“Did you find it?”

She lets out a slow breath, then nods again.

“Call the others.

As children, death isn’t real.

Then we start to get older. Maybe we lose a grandparent or something.

There comes a time in everyone’s life where we become acutely—and at times uncomfortably—aware of death not just as a concept but as a fact. That, I think, is the reason that kids almost all inevitably go through a goth phase in their teens.

Sometimes, though… some of us are unlucky enough to become painfully aware of death at an age when we don’t have the faculties to really grapple with it. Kids like that often get called ‘old souls’ or ‘mature for their age’. Those are all very complimentary ways of admitting that the six-year-old you’re looking at has lost something fundamental to their youth far too early. It’s not something people want to think or talk about, so they couch it in terms that make it more palatable.

“So we’re really doing this, huh?” Starlight asks, hefting a shovel against her shoulder.

Snowfall is coming down in bitter force by the time we’re all gathered in front of the gates to Whitetail Cemetery. It’s an expansive plot of land that stretches over the hills of Whitetail towards the opposite verge of the Everfree where it curls around the southern edge of Canterlot. It’s so far out of the way of the commonly driven roads of the suburb that you’d only run across it if you were already coming here, going somewhere else overly specific, or if you lived nearby.

“Yeah, we’re doing this,” I reply as I pull a set of lockpicks from my pocket and start fitting them into the padlock securing the doors.

It’s easier to do something like this when the cemetery’s closed, but that also meant delaying even more than I liked. Still, we had to know for sure. Plus, if we find what I think we’ll find, we may actually—literally—dig up a lead.

“We’re already abominations against god and nature!” Sour says cheerfully. “Why not add some graverobbing to the mix?”

“Technically we’re not robbing graves,” Aria points out as she leans on her own shovel. “We’re just taking a peek inside a coffin.”

“So we’re necro-voyeurs,” Starlight says blandly. “How comforting.”

“Hey, can the peanut gallery pipe down?” I grumble as I work at the lock. It’s a rusted piece of shit, so much so I’d doubt that the actual key would fit comfortably. “I’m trying to remember how to break-and-enter the old fashioned way.”

“Step back.”

Adagio slips between the four of us and I barely manage to yelp and roll away before she hefts her wood-ax and brings it down in a clean, sharp, woodcutter’s chop.

The Fog-forged metal passes through the steel chain attached to the padlock with barely a whisper and the smile of it ends buried in the concrete walkway. Adagio gives the ax a couple of tugs to free it before kicking the doors open with a deafening rattle and stepping through.

“I want to get out of here as quickly as possible,” she says as her grip tightens on the haft of the ax, making the wood creak.

“Right,” I mutter as I stand up. “Guess so much for going in quiet.”

Starlight chuckles at that. “You’re the lookout, Sunset. If anyone comes around just put them to sleep.”

I roll my eyes, but nod as she passes me. Sour and Aria give me a couple of nods, too, each hefting their own shovels as we make our way into the graveyard.

“Explain to me again why we’re not just going to the source?” Sour asks, not unpleasantly, but in a tone that told me she wasn’t going to take ‘because I said so’ as an answer.

“If we think it’s them, why not just shake down the redhead?”

“Because that would be going in blind in the worst possible way,” I say without pausing in my stride.

“The fact of the matter is that we know absolutely nothing about any of this. We know the bare fucking minimum about the Legion, we know tidbits about the gunslinger who watches over them, and jack-all about the Thief themselves. Now I don’t know about you—” I pause to look pointedly at Sour “—but I’m not going to try and ambush someone I know nothing about! If the Thief can create Killers, who’s to say they can’t take away their powers too?”

Sour Sweet meets my gaze steadily for a moment, then nods before looking thoughtful and meeting my eyes again.

“So what do we gain with this?” She asks. “Knowing if it’s them?”

“It means we can narrow our search,” I reply. “Even if I’m ninety-five percent sure, I don’t want to leave this to chance. I have to be totally certain. Otherwise, I’ll be fighting on the back heel again.”

That gets me an odd look, but I’m rescued from answering for myself by Adagio chiming in.

“It’s her magic,” Adagio says.

Starlight, Sour, and Aria share looks before turning to the elder ex-Siren who’s leading us deeper and deeper into the cemetery. Despite the dark, Adagio is as surefooted as can be, and even with the low-light the rest of us are adapted to, none of us have eyes like hers.

The eyes of the Huntress.

“Oneiromancy is no common art,” Adagio continues. “Unless you know whose mind you’re delving into, you’re exposing yourself to innumerable dangers.”

“Didn’t you deep-dive every Killer in the Entity’s roster during the Exodus, though?” Starlight asks with a raised eyebrow.

“Yeah, but there are three big differences this time around,” I say, holding up a hand. “One, they were my siblings, however distant. We Killers have an innate awareness of one another, so that helped. Two, fully-fledged Killers have pretty crude minds to begin with. It means my powers don’t work quite right on them, but it also means their identity is less complex… in short it takes less grunt to get to their minds, but Legion isn’t all the way Killer.”

“And third?” Aria asks.

“Third is the biggest problem,” I admit. “Third is that during the Exodus I was being fortified by my Trial ground. They were on my turf.”

Aria scowls.

“Right,” She says softly. “It’s like Tem—” she cuts off and grimaces, but I just angrily wave her onward “—like… Tempest said, back when Red first landed, Whoever’s Trial we’re in? We survive on their terms, not ours.”

“Ideally, we won’t fight them there at all,” Adagio says wryly over her shoulder.

“Right,” I reply. “I’d much rather hit them outside their grounds, assuming they have any… which means knowing where it is. Anyway, tee-el-dee-ar, my powers aren’t going to be at full chat on the Legion unless I know precisely who they are. Not suspect… but know. And even then I’ll be stunted by the Fog shrouding their minds.”

“We’re here.”

Our little party stops in front of a long row of gravestones. Each headstone is different, with some being larger or smaller, some made of dark granite and others of veined marble. The one we’re in front of is a simple grey stone whose epitaph seemed almost offensively brief.

Scootaloo

Beloved Daughter and Precious Friend

Rest In Peace

“If you are down there,” I say quietly. “Then apologies in advance.”

I nod to the three girls as Adagio and I take our places around the stone, far enough away that we’ll be able to hear if a guard comes around. Aria, Sour Sweet, and Starlight Glimmer heft their shovels, plant them in the earth, and start to dig.

It’s grim work, and it takes the better part of an hour. The dirt goes in two large piles at either side of the grave as the girls go deeper and deeper.

The further they go, the more uncertain I feel. If I am wrong, and the Legion are really three unknowns, that means we’re starting from worse than nowhere. As tragic as it is, Legion really being those three girls is actually the best-case scenario. It means I’ll have a shot at making my magic work on them.

“We made it!” Aria calls from the grave.

I turn away from my watch and move to the edge of the pit. Beneath me is a yawning maw of dirt and filth where Sour Sweet and Aria are standing, with Starlight at the other side helping to ferry dirt up and away from the edge as the hole got too deep to easily remove.

“And?” I ask.

“Gimme a second.”

Aria kneels and starts brushing away dirt and grit from the coffin. It’s relatively plain, much like the headstone above it, and that rankles. Even if the family was of modest means—and if they lived in Whitetail they had to at least be decently off—then why would they be so miserly with burying their only daughter?

The look on Adagio’s face when I glance over at her tells me she’s thinking much the same thing in far more unpleasant terms.

“Are you okay?” I ask softly.

“No.”

The word is short, clipped, and carries a hundred lifetimes worth of regret and anger. I don’t push her. I can’t. Sister or no… I don’t have that right.

I’m not sure anyone does.

“Okay, we’ve got it!” Aria calls up.

“And?” I say again.

Wood creaks and cracks as Aria and Sour Sweet pry open the coffin. Part of me expects the charnel stink of old death to billow out, although if it did I have a feeling it would only bring on a sense of nostalgia.

No such smell wafts out, though.

“It’s empty.” Sour’s voice is thin and bitter. “No body, just some weights… probably so the pallbearers wouldn’t get suspicious.”

“Then she’s alive,” I say as I crouch at the edge of the grave and look down.

Sure enough, the casket has nothing in it but a few pieces of shaved-down concrete that probably approximated the weight of the girl they were supposed to be burying, which meant there weren’t even all that many of those.

“For certain definitions of the term,” Adagio says. “If she was brought back from the brink I can guarantee it wasn’t by wholesome means.”

“Gee ya think?” Sour grumbles as she puts out a hand. I take a grip and haul her up and out of the pit as Adagio does the same for her sister. “If she’s up and running around after getting twelve to the chest then it’s only because she’s a Survivor like us. We’re not made to die.”

I nod at that as Sour Sweet brushes dirt from her pants and walks over to Starlight who slips her arms around her girlfriend and hugs her tight. I look away from the display of affection as an unfamiliar spike of pain and jealousy digs into my gut, and turn back to my sisters.

“I’m putting a map together, we’ll go over it tomorrow,” I say. “Between this, police reports, and our own footwork, we should be able to narrow down where they’re based.”

“Do you really think they have one?” Aria asks as she turns to me with a deep scowl. “A Trial, I mean.”

It’s a good question, and one I don’t have a clearcut answer to.

“We can’t know for certain until we find them,” I say. “But at this point, I’m hedging my bets on caution over optimism.”

Maybe the Thief doesn’t have the magical grunt to create a fully-formed Trial, I hope they don’t, but I can’t afford to assume that. I can't afford to assume anything is in our favor anymore. Now that we know it’s them I have to tell Rainbow Dash, then we have to gather our forces, pin them down, and end this threat once and for all.

At least now, we actually have something to work off of. We finally have some progress.

“Well if it’s all the same to you ladies,” Sour starts as she turns to us, “I’m gonna go take a shower, and then we’re gonna grab some food.”

“Only after we fill in this hole,” Aria says, gesturing at the open grave.

Sour Sweet and Starlight both grimace, then sigh, and I start laughing quietly.

“You take us to the nicest places,” Starlight grumbles at me as she picks up her shovel.

Silver claws breach the Wall of Sleep as I step out onto the roof of Canterlot General, and my boots follow them. It’s cold and windy up here, but it’s also quiet and empty, plus I know this place well enough that I can get here from almost anywhere in the city with a minimum of effort.

That’s very on brand for me.

Minimum effort.

I fold out of the Fog and into the Real, and leave my Killer shape behind me before reaching into my pocket and pulling out my phone to open up the list of contacts and find the one I never thought I’d use again.

//Roof of Canterlot General Hospital. Main Building. ASAP.//

She doesn’t reply to the text, but I don’t need her to. The little ‘Read’ marking pops up a second later and now all I have to do is wait. I don’t like waiting. I hate idling. It’s the thing I’m worst at. It’s the reason I ended up here in the first place.

All my life, I’ve been unable to wait and it’s continually bitten me in the ass.

I couldn’t wait for power as a filly, so I pushed myself and took shortcuts. I learned magic at the cost of anything and everything that might have actually made me happy. Then I saw myself as an alicorn and couldn’t wait for that, so I pushed and pushed until Princess Celestia herself expelled me from her tutelage, and then, even knowing she would probably take me back, a mixture of wounded pride and impatience drove me through the portal.

One day, maybe I’ll learn patience, but today is not that day.

The Fog ripples behind me, and I turn to face the girl—now young woman—that I hate most in this world.

“Hey, Shimmer,” Rainbow says, smiling from beneath her hood of crude leather as she plants her cane on the roof. “How’s it hanging?”

“Short, shriveled, and to the left,” I snap. “I’ve got some bad news.”

“Is there any other kind?” Rainbow asks, my venom missing her completely.

I pinch the bridge of my nose and draw back on the urge to lash out. That won’t help me here, and it won’t help my friends. For now, I need a little more information and I need this extraplanar junkie on my side.

“Did you know about Scootaloo?” I ask, opting for the ‘knife-to-the-heart’ approach.

Her look of confusion and the raised eyebrow I get tells me most of what I need to know.

“Know what? I cut ties with all three of them the night we escaped,” She says, a touch defensively. “I didn’t want anything to do with her after what she and her stupid friends did to you.”

“Completely self-focused, like usual,” I say bitterly.

“Hey!” Rainbow snaps, anger blooming across her features for the first time as she jabs her cane at me. “You, of all fucking people, don’t get to tell me who I should and shouldn’t be friends with, okay?! I cut them outta my life because of what they did and that’s fucking fair! I didn’t owe them a god damn thing!”

I open my mouth to rebuke her but stop halfway through. The fact is, I don’t really have a rebuke.

“I…” I start, then step back and shake my head. “You’re right, I’m… I’m sorry.”

The anger fades from Rainbow’s face as she steps back, replaced with a shade of still-defensive confusion.

“You mean that?”

“What?”

“The apology.”

Crossing my arms over my chest, I shrug, then nod. To my surprise, I find I actually do mean it. Rainbow had a point. She’d done the same thing I had and for pretty much the same reason. Scootaloo had been like Rainbow’s little sister. Finding out that she’d been betrayed by someone she loved—someone who’d been so close to her—must have hurt like hell.

“Yeah,” I say after a moment. “I was out of line… you’re right, you had no reason to keep talking to them.”

Rainbow relaxes back, the belligerence fading from her posture as she plants her cane down by her feet again.

“To be honest,” Rainbow continues quietly. “I haven’t really kept up with anyone since I dropped out of CHS. At least, not since the shit with Applejack. Fluttershy is still pretty sore about that.”

“Can I ask what happened?” I can’t deny I’m curious. I can’t imagine what it took to rip them apart like this.

Shrugging, Rainbow raises her cane, jabs it down at the ground, then lets go, and the thing just stands there, upright, like a magic trick, as Rainbow moves in front of it to us it like an impromptu stool.

“It’s complicated,” she says as she sweeps a hand over her short hair, brushing her cowl back as she does. “I got into some bad habits after I lost you, and then I got worse.”

She shrugs an arm out of her long leather coat and rolls up a sleeve from her linen shirt to show off a swathe of flesh covered in a network of scars that barely manage to obscure the track marks along her veins.

“We talk about it a lot in group,” Dash admits quietly. “Drugs, alcohol, razors, they’re all just different ways of hurting yourself… unhealthy coping mechanisms and stuff.” She gestures out toward the Everfree. “I ended up living with AJ right outta the hospital, and I guess I was hoping we could talk about what I went through, but like… when I showed her all this,” she points at her arm, “she just bolted.”

Despite myself, I wince.

“That’s shitty,” I say softly. “Bet she felt like shit, too.”

Rainbow snorts and nods.

“Yeah, she apologised but Fluttershy never forgave her,” she replies, before shaking her head and sitting up a little. “So what’s Scoots gotta do with all this? I never get out to Whitetail anymore between all my other shit, and I know Flutters basically cut ties with everyone but Pinks, and I hear Rarity’s fallen off the map.”

By way of answer, I pull out my phone and bring up the article that Adagio had dug up back under the canal about the shooting in the East End.

“Catch.” I toss her my phone and she nabs it out of the air with a flick of the wrist.

“What am I—” Her words die unmourned as she scans both the title of the article, and the photograph underneath it. “Oh… Scoots.”

Tears well up in Rainbow Dash’s eyes as she slips off of her cane and drops to her knees clutching the phone. Her breath comes in heaves as she reads the article over, and she has to wipe her eyes several times before she finally gets to the end, shakes her head, and holds my phone back out to me with her head hung low.

“Don’t take it too hard,” I say as I reclaim my phone. “She didn’t stay dead.”

Rainbow stiffens, then looks up with wide eyes.

I start to open my mouth—to tell her what I and the others learned—but I never get the chance to as Rainbow says the word I was about to explain.

“Legion.”

One eyebrow crooks upward into my hair, and I laugh quietly. Rainbow is kind of dumb, that’s no secret. She’s a himbo with a murder complex and the backing of a daemonic god. But with that said, of all of the girls, Rainbow was always the most likely to make those weird and sudden leaps of logic that connects a dozen seemingly unrelated points.

She’s a creature of instinct, and for whatever it’s worth, her instincts are usually pretty good.

“Yeah.” I point out towards Whitetail. “There was some really hinky shit about her burial we followed up on, and sure enough her grave is empty.”

“So someone made Scoots and the others into…” Rainbow trails off but gestures between the two of us.

I shake my head. “Not exactly. They’re unfinished, but they’re also incredibly dangerous. Right now, we’re trying to narrow down their turf. Even if they don’t have a real Trial ground, they’ve gotta be living somewhere and once I know I’ll call you, in the meantime, keep an eye out, will you?”

“Sure thing,” Rainbow stands and wipes at her eyes, “what about you?”

I tap the side of my head as I step back from her, back and back and back until I’m at the edge of the roof.

“I’m gonna make a map,” I say as the wind catches me.

“I’ll call you when I have something.”

The last thing I see is Rainbow’s smirk as I drop off the edge of the building and fall into the Fog.

I fall through the darkness of the Dreamtime, and as I do I catch the strands of reality with my fingers, tighten my grip, and pull. My momentum turns, reorients, and then comes to an abrupt, painless halt as my boots hit concrete. I take a step, then another, until I step out of the Fog and onto a bridge.

As I do, I reach into my jacket and draw out the cheap map of the city I’d picked up to do my work on. I could go back to the apartment and do this on a proper desk but honestly, it’s the last place I want to be right now. Starlight and Sour Sweet are going to be going out again and Aria is definitely going to be with Redheart, and I really don’t want to be there alone with my thoughts.

It’s easier to concentrate here.

Unfolding the map, I shake it loose and look it over before pulling out a sharpie and making dots at where I know their hits took place. I start with the murders that the girls and I confirmed. Those go quickly, it’s something we did before when we started collecting the information to begin with but just like back then there’s no clear pattern. There are kills scattered all over the city, none of the murders are localized, none of them have any clear motive beyond bloodlust.

But that was before we accounted for the non-murder crimes. We’d been treating these three like bog-standard Killers despite knowing that wasn’t accurate. We’d done it out of habit.

The acts of vandalism and petty theft go onto the map in a different color. Dots here and there noting break-ins. The notes the Detective had access to showed stills from CCTV security cams, sometimes from the places they hit, other times from places across the street.

Either way, they’re all confirmed cases.

All told it takes me a little less than an hour to put it all on paper, and when I finally do—

“Nothing.” I tighten my grip on the pen as I glare at the map. “No pattern… just a bunch of fucking dots.”

“You’re back.”

I jerk out of my frustrated stupor and my pen clatters to the slush-and-frost covered ground as I look up.

Wallflower Blush is standing a few meters away, her arms wrapped around herself, and a look of wariness on her face.

The sharpie rolls across the paved sidewalk, the only sound other than the faint wind and the icy flow of the River Canter until it stops against her shoe. Slowly Wallflower kneels down and plucks the pen from the ground, then wipes it off on her jacket.

“I… I should be the one saying that,” I say softly as I fold up the map and tuck it away. “I uhm… I didn’t think I’d see you again. Or I figured you’d run away even if I did.”

Wallflower shrugs.

“You saw me that night,” I say, and she raises an eyebrow. “The real me, I mean… the monster.”

She swallows visibly, then takes a few tentative steps forward.

“It was real?” She asks, her face unreadable.

“Yeah.”

Neither of us speaks for a long moment as she stares at me. Honestly, I’m really surprised she can even meet my gaze. She seemed so shy the few times we talked, but now she was showing more backbone in a few minutes than most people show in their whole lives.

“Can I see it again?”

My jaw drops. I cannot have heard that right.

“Can you… what?” I ask through a surprised chuckle. “You’re kidding right?”

Wallflower shakes her head.

“No, uhm, but if you don’t want to…”

Holding up a hand, I take a step back and deep breath before laughing and looking back at her. She saw me—she saw my real face—and now she wants to see it again? That’s easily the most absurd thing I’ve heard all week and that is a real trick considering what I’ve been up to lately.

“Y’know what, sure,” I say, waving a hand dismissively, “why not? This night is already a huge disappointment, I may as well double down, right? Let’s do the full monty.”

Wallflower frowns but I don’t give her a chance to say anything before I shift.

My jacket flaps and flickers in the wind, elongating to a long dark, ragged coat, and my hair flicks around my face like a dark pennant, the red dye masking the gold streaks in my hair washing out as the full, curling strands turn heavy and lank around a face that’s suddenly red, feverish, and sliced with blue veins.

I brush the hair from my eyes with my fingerblades and grin.

“So?” I say as I brandish my claws. “How do I look? I knew I shouldn’t have skipped my manicure last week.”

I’ve never really considered how harsh my voice sounds in this form before, but it really is unpleasant.

Shockingly, Wallflower doesn’t run away screaming. She barely even moves. She just stares at me. Her eyes rove across my face, and I can feel it almost like a tangible force. She takes in my sharp teeth and my burning eyes. The fever-red flesh and the cold blue rage in my veins.

And she doesn’t draw back.

She looks at me, and at my face, and at my hands and claws, and then back up to me before walking closer and closer until we’re so close that I can smell the faint scent of summer grass off of her.

Right now, she should be more scared than she’s ever been in her life. Wallflower Blush should be terrified and running. She should be screaming and fleeing from a thing of literal nightmares, but she’s not. Even more surprising is that I don’t want to hurt her. The voice in the back of my head is actually quiet as Wallflower raises her hands, tugs her gloves off, and puts her palms to my cheeks.

“You’re so warm,” she says.

“I…” My breath mists harshly in the cold air.

I try to resist the urge but I just don’t have it in me. It’s been so long since someone has just… just touched the real me, and not been afraid. So I close my eyes, bow my head a little, and let myself rest in her hands.

“I knew you weren’t really a monster.”

She smiling at me when I open my eyes. Her face is so soft, and from this close, I can count the freckles that scatter across her button nose and dimpled cheeks to frame her warm brown eyes.

“How can you say that?” I hiss. “Look at me.”

“I am,” Wallflower replies. “And I don’t see a monster.”

Soft fingers trace across my face and brush my hair away from my eyes before trailing down to my jaw, then lower until her hand is resting on mine.

Then she does something that not even Aria or Tempest has ever had the courage to do.

She takes my hand in hers, brings it up between us, and touches my claws.

“I think you’re beautiful.”

I can’t breathe. I can barely swallow as she holds on to my hand, and I do my best to keep my hand relaxed and still. If I don’t I might cut her and for once that’s the last thing I want to do. Usually, I have to fight my impulses to keep from cutting people, but not her.

Not Wallflower.

“How?”

She shakes her head and shrugs.

“Because some of us grew up with real monsters.”

Of all the things I expected, of all people and all places, none of this was among them. This isn’t fair. I resigned myself to being dead. To being the monster of Canterlot’s darkest dreams. I’d let myself cling to the vestiges of humanity by staying with Tempest in order to keep myself sane, but I’d never let myself believe for a moment that she wanted anything to do with what I really am.

This… ugly thing.

It’s so much easier to accept that I’m a monster. That I’m a demon without remorse that lives for one purpose and one purpose only, and who fully intended to commit themselves to that purpose once all of this Canterlot business was done with.

So it’s not fair, now, this late in the game, for me to find out that someone might actually want me for me.

It would be so much easier to believe that Wallflower is lying, but I don’t see how that’s possible. She’s touching me. Touching the cold, silver, Fogforged blades that my fingers taper off into.

She’s not afraid of me.

No one’s poker face is that good.

“I wish I’d met you before all of this,” I say, my voice coming out more haggard and raw than usual. “I wish I’d met you before I fell… before I lost who I used to be.”

“Maybe you didn’t lose anything,” Wallflower says, brushing my cheek with her other hand. “Maybe you found who you were supposed to be.”

I don’t bother holding back as I lean my face against Wallflower’s touch. I can’t even remember the last time I felt someone put their hand on me like this. The sensation is alien and yet at the same time, I crave more of it, and I hate it.

This isn’t fair. I don’t want to feel human again.

To feel vulnerable again.

It’s not fair.

My phone rings, saving me from any more heartache, and I pull away from Wallflower as I swallow hard to try and find my breath again.

“I uhm, I have to—” I don’t get any further before she jumps a little, then pulls out a cell phone of her own which is vibrating.

“It’s okay,” she says, laughing softly. “I should take this, too.”

She puts her back to me as I shift back to my human form, pull out my phone, and tap the answer button as Adagio’s name flashes across the screen.

“Yeah?”

//They took Aria.//

My heart goes cold at the tight, ragged fury in Adagio’s voice.

“Wha—”

//And I can’t reach Sour or Starlight.//

“Where are you?”

//Home.//

“I’m on my way.”

I turn back to Wallflower who’s looking down at her phone in concern before glancing up at me.

“Sorry, I have to go,” I say as I shove my phone in my pocket. “Something came up.”

“Will you come back?” She asks in that soft tone of hers that I find I like quite a lot.

‘If I survive this,’ I think bitterly.

Instead, I just nod, then sweep my hand out and gather the Fog around me. It’s getting easier and easier lately. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, but it’s convenient, and probably has something to do with how much time I’m spending in my ‘Real’ body.

“Okay,” she says.

Then she steps close again, goes up on her toes, and presses her lips to my cheek.

“Good luck.”

I blink in confusion as heat flushes across my face, and I put a couple of fingers on the spot where the sensation of her lips still lingers.

“With what?” I ask.

Wallflower shrugs. “I don’t know. It just seemed like the right thing to say.”

As I let the Fog swallow me, I smile a little. Maybe there’s a little hope after all, or maybe not. Right now, I have bigger things to worry about, and I touch the little warm spot on my cheek again.

But either way, I’ll need all the luck I can get.

Author's Note

Most will end up here, covered in the poisoned earth, awaiting merciful oblivion.

Support me on my Patreon where you can check out chapters of my original novel, Bare Knuckles & Butterflies, as they're released!

Interlude 3 - 1 - The Broken Girl

Sour Sweet

“Welcome to Sunbucks! What can I get you?”

Your overly peppy tongue on a silver platter you high-waisted, candy-ass—

“Medium Peppermint Mocha,” I say. “You want anything, babe?”

Starlight smiles up at me and while the white noise in my head doesn’t fade, it does switch gears.

Starlight Glimmer.

True to her name, her smile is starlight and it puts sparkles in my chest and in my head, and I can’t help but smile back at her. After having spent the last two hours getting covered in gravedirt and snow digging up the not-body from an empty casket, I figure we both deserve something sweet, and this is one of the few twenty-four-hour places nearby.

“Gingersnap Chai,” she says as she molds herself against me. “Thanks.”

“Large Gingersnap Chai for the pretty lady,” I say, grinning. “And snap to it!”

The barista’s smile crumples and she jumps at my tone. I have to bite my lip to keep from swearing, but Starlight moves between us before anything else unfortunate can get out of my howling swear-craw.

“Sorry, it’s a tic,” Starlight says as she deftly picks my wallet from my pocket, pulls out my credit card, and taps it on the reader. “Thanks!”

“Uh, s-sure, names for the drinks?” She asks shakily.

“Sour Sweet,” I say, straining to keep my tone neutral.

I don’t really do neutral.

Giving the arm she has captured in the crook of her elbow a small tug, Starlight pulls me away from the register toward one of the rearmost tables, and the whole time she stays as close to me as possible. She and I learned early in our relationship that the pair of us, for all of our fascinating cocktail of disorders, actually balance each other out fairly well.

Not because one is the positive to the other’s negative pole or anything.

At least that’s not the case for me.

This isn’t a case of opposites attracting or equals balancing out. It’s a lot simpler than that.

It’s because being with Starlight makes me want to be better. It’s easier to rationalise trying harder to not be a heinous bitch a square fifty percent of the time when she’s beside me. I don’t want her to see me like that so I do more to keep that part under control.

As for Starlight, I think it’s pretty much the same.

We settle into the seats, and Starlight leans her head against my shoulder before turning to stare out at the snow-dappled windows and across the lamplit evening streets of Canterlot.

Following my impulse, like I usually do, I lean down and press a soft kiss to Starlight’s head right where her green beanie meets her violet and turquoise locks, and she giggles softly.

“Stop that.”

“No,” I reply with a chuckle.

“Mm… alright.” Starlight looks up at me for a brief moment before pecking a small kiss to the underside of my jaw. “I love you.”

“Love you too.”

And I do.

If one good thing came from getting sucked into those insane Trials and losing God-only-knows how much sleep to horrific nightmares of butcher’s hooks and bear traps, it was meeting Starlight. My absolute favorite person in all the world.

As I mentioned, I don’t really do neutral.

Out of nowhere, Starlight’s grip tightens, and she buries her face against my shoulder as she starts taking deep breaths.

“Star?”

“Heartbeat.”

She doesn’t need to say anything more. It’s her most common auditory hallucination. As far as I can tell there’s no specific outside thing that triggers it. It’s just a misfire in her brain triggering the auditory cortex and flicking a few synapses awake in the hypothalamus that react easily and quickly, and the memory of the Heartbeat is one that no Survivor will ever forget.

“It’s not there,” I say quietly. “And it never will be again.”

Starlight nods while forcing herself to take long, slow, deep breaths as she tries to keep her nerves in check. It’s a habit she got into that I taught her along with a variety of meditation techniques which ended up mitigating much of the intensity of her episodes, if not the frequency.

“Chai and Mocha for Sour!”

I look up at the register, then back down to Starlight who just nods as she reluctantly lets go of my arm.

“It’s okay,” she says weakly. “I know it’s not real.”

“You sure?” I ask, putting a hand over hers. “The drinks can wait.”

“It’s fine.”

I grimace, but I don’t push the issue. Starlight is proud. More so than most people realise, and besides, treating my girlfriend like an invalid is a really good way to get couched, I found out. So I just nod, stand, and walk over to the register to sweep up the drinks.

“Thanks,” I mutter.

“Is she okay?” The barista asks.

“Oh she’s fine,” I say with a shrug. “She’s just got a bad case of mind your own fucking business.”

The barista stiffens again.

“Tch.” I click my tongue and look away. I start to walk away too but a different impulse overcomes me and I turn back to look at the terrified food worker. “Sorry… it’s… it’s a tic.”

The apology comes out like a rotten tooth, and better yet is that I don’t think it even went over that well. The look the barista is giving me is the kind usually reserved for people that you suspect might eat puppies in their downtime which is pretty unfair considering how gamey dogs are and the fact that chihuahua’s are more like rats than canids.

That train of intrusive thoughts puts a smile on my face, and the barista’s expression face only grows more concerned.

I click my tongue again and turn away, making my way through the holiday crowds to the table where Starlight is looking a little more even-keeled than when I left her.

“Gingersnap Chai for the prettiest girl in Canterlot,” I say with a broad smirk.

Starlight smiles back and, for the life of me, I still don’t know why. She once told me that my smile looks like a knife wound because, as best I can figure, it’s just too wide and too straight at the same time.

She also told me she loves my smile though, so I guess there’s that.

“Thanks,” she says softly as she takes it and breathes deeply of the fragrant steam coming off of it. “That smells amazing.”

“You smell amazing,” I say as I slip in beside her, and she flushes.

“Down girl.” Starlight bumps my hip with her own before taking a sip of her drink. “Did they treat you okay? The baristas I mean.”

“Eh, same old,” I say with a shrug as I slug back my too-hot mocha. I don’t know why I do it. It burns my tongue but at the same time, I can’t help it. I like it hot but it hurts but—“Ah! Ow! OW! HOT!”

“You knew it would happen,” Starlight mumbles around her drink.

She’s long since lost any sympathy for me, which is fair. I’ve also lost sympathy for me.

“I know,” I say around my scalded tongue. “Tho whatcha wanna do now?”

Starlight starts laughing as I stick my tongue out to try and cool it down, and shakes her head.

“You’re such a disaster,” she says before leaning in kissing my cheek. “Hold on, I’ll go grab some ice water.”

I nod as she takes another sip of her Chai, then walks over, drink in hand, to the barista. Watching Starlight Glimmer move and talk and smile and just… just exist is one of my favorite things to do. Maybe it’s part of my disorder, but I really don’t care. Just like I don’t care that the divisions in my personality got worse after we got out of the Trials. The contrasts are starker; the dark shades are darker and the light shades are almost blinding.

She’s blinding.

And I’m like a sinkhole for her light; I’m sucking it in and destroying it, or at least that’s how it feels sometimes. I know that’s not right because it’s not fair to her or me.

Star and I both have our issues, but we’re good together.

I have to believe that.

“YEAH WELL FUCK YOU, COFFEE THOT!”

The sound of a drenching impact precedes a scream, and I jerk out of my malaise of thought to blink and orient myself in time to see Starlight standing furiously over a barista who’s down on her ass and covered head to toe in hot Chai with a positively livid Starlight Glimmer standing over her.

I practically leap from my seat, cross the dining room of the cafe in a flash, and grab her by the arm. She briefly whirls on me, her eyes blazing, but her expression softens the moment she fixates on me. Then I’m pulling her out of the Sunbucks and onto the frigid streets of Canterlot as I’m buttoning my coat and hooking our arms together.

“Jesus, Star!” I say as I drag her down the sidewalk towards the lot where I parked the Corvette. “Did they poke your crazy too hard or what?!”

I flinch the moment the ‘c’ word escapes my lips.

“Shit, sorry, I—”

“No, I know,” Starlight says bitterly as she grips my arm and buries her face against my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Sour, I didn’t mean to—shit—I guess we can’t go back there either now, huh?”

“Not for another six months at least but the turnover at those places is pretty high,” I say dryly. “So they’ll probably be fired come Spring.”

Starlight laughs quietly at my tic surfacing, and for once at least it isn’t barbed in her direction. I hate that the most; when I accidentally say something that cuts at her.

“So uh,” I start awkwardly. “That’s like… what? Six cafes-stroke-restaurants we’re either officially or at least probably banned from?”

“I think so,” Starlight replies as she clutches at me a little more tightly.

“Do you wanna talk about what happened?”

She doesn’t reply at first. She just settles against me and walks, so I keep our pace slow but steady as I lean my head against hers. Starlight is kind of the perfect height for me because she’s about half a head shorter than me, meaning that while we walk she can lay her head on my shoulder while I lay my head against her soft hair.

Which smells perpetually of lavender, by the way.

I’m not sure if that’s always been my favorite scent, but it sure as hell is now.

“She asked me if she should call the police,” Starlight says suddenly.

I turn my head a little to look down at her.

“Why?”

Starlight chuckles a little bitterly, then looks up at me briefly before leaning up to press her lips to mine in a fleeting kiss.

“She thought you were…” Starlight trails off for a moment before shrugging and settling her head against my shoulder again. “She thought I was in trouble.”

“Oh.”

Maybe it’s naive of me, but I’d never considered that someone on the outside might look at me, then look at Starlight, and think something like that. I mean, we’re both pretty crazy but, if I’m being honest, Starlight passes as neurotypical with a lot more grace than I do. I have BPD shaken and stirred with a verbal tic like Tourettes butt-fucked an open mic roast night at a bad comedy club.

The truth is that I can see it.

I’m kind of a massive bitch, even if it’s not intentional, and my tic comes out so nasty most of the time that I can’t blame people for thinking I might be treating Starlight poorly even if just the idea of that makes me sick to my stomach.

“Sorry,” I say quietly. “I… I tried to keep a handle, but—”

“Don’t be!” Starlight grabs hold of me, stopping me in the middle of the sidewalk and turning me to face her. “They don’t know how… how bad I can get! They have no idea what I’m like, they just hear you say some mean crap and suddenly assume you’re abusing me when I’m so much worse!”

We’re getting looks from passersby, and normally it doesn’t bother me, but this is probably not a conversation we should be having in the middle of an open street, so I just readjust my hold on Starlight and guide her out of the mass of people and into the small parking lot.

My Corvette is my only real indulgence in terms of Adagio’s offer to buy us random and insanely expensive crap since she and her sisters barely touch their savings. It’s a professionally restored, black-and-gold, classic nineteen-sixty-nine Stingray, and when I asked Adagio how much it cost she said ‘some hundred grand for the restoration’, but nothing else.

It took me until I got the registration signed over to my name that I understood why it was she said it only cost her for the restoration because the signatory on the agreement was listed as Serenata Dazzle.

Adagio had given me her car.

“C’mon.”

I move around the passenger side door, pop it open, and help her in before joining her around the other side a moment later.

The engine turns over with a throaty, asthmatic roar that settles into a comfortable rumble as I flip the heater on. This old codger is a relic that’s better than twice my age, so it takes a lot of specialised care just to keep the basic crap running. Fortunately, there’s a couple of old Marexican mechanics in the Commons who know their way around the classics that I take it to a couple of times a month for a checkup.

Starlight holds her hands up to the vent to take in the heat, and I reach out to wrap her hands in mine and rub at her cold fingers.

“You’re so sweet to me,” Starlight says quietly.

I look up at her with a quirked eyebrow.

“I hate that everyone assumes that, between the two of us, you’re the less stable one,” she continues in a low voice. “I hate it. I really, really hate it.”

“Yeah well, I don’t mind,” I reply. “Since I’m pretty fucking broken.”

Starlight frowns, then sighs and shakes her head.

“You know I’d be completely out of my mind without you, right?” she asks.

“Well, at least you’d still be alive.”

I clap my hand over my mouth as the words fall out. I hadn’t meant to say that out loud but this fucking tic is like the opposite of impulse control. It’s a verbal shotgun that my stupid brain keeps reloading and then firing on automatic.

The total lack of response is more worrying than anything, so with an effort of will, I tamp down my sudden panic and turn my head to look over at Starlight Glimmer.

She’s staring at me, eyes wide and mouth open.

“Why…” Starlight starts shakily. “Why would you say that?”

I lower my hand from across my lips and sigh in annoyance.

“Sunset isn’t the only one whose life was uhm, saved—” I make air quotes as I grimace through the word—“by the Entity, alright?”

Starlight moves her hands out of mine, then she shifts closer and puts her arms over my shoulders as she leans in.

“Tell me?”

Damn it. Those stupid pretty eyes of hers always get me. All she has to do is stick out her lip a little, look up at me, and I instantly cave in. Starlight has me wrapped around her little finger and she knows it, and frankly? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

It still gets annoying sometimes, though.

“I… lied,” I say after a moment. “Back at the campfire, back in the Trials? However long ago that was… years, days, decades… fuck, I don’t remember anymore, but I lied.

“Back then, I told you all I was out at the Everfree for a country retreat, and that was true. I used to go to Crystal Preparatory Academy and we had a weekend retreat thing for all the sports clubs, so naturally, mother dearest insisted I go, and it was a real… a real low point for me. I was miserable, I hated everything and everyone and especially myself, and so I made a decision.”

Starlight watches me with a kind of worried caution. I can see the fear in her eyes, not of me but of what I’m about to tell her. We both know what it means to not want to know something and I get the feeling this is something she probably doesn’t want to know.

But it might be something that she needs to know.

“I was hopeless, I was so beaten and broken after spending all my life having my brain full of shattered glass get shoved into a perfect little box over and over,” I continue quietly, and I hate how my voice is starting to shake. “I hated everything and everyone!” The words come out in a brittle snarl, but Starlight doesn’t flinch, she just holds on as I get control again. “My bow and quiver were the only things I brought with me. I went into the forest and… and I don’t even know what I was expecting to do… hang myself by my bowstring? Slit my wrists with my arrowheads? All I know is that I went in there and I… I wasn’t planning on coming out, okay?”

Rather than try to say anything—and frankly, I don’t even know what there is to say—Starlight just tightens her arms around me in a warm embrace.

“It’s funny,” I say with a hollow sob. “I left the campgrounds ready to die and that readiness lasted right up until I stepped in a bear trap. Then, suddenly, I was screaming my head off.”

Tears are rolling down my cheeks and into Starlight’s hair, and I wrap my arms around her middle as I bury my face in her shoulder. I wanted so bad to just have it all end back then. I was so tired of my parents beating me into the shape of something I would never be; the perfect straight-A student. The perfect gold-medal athlete. The perfect daughter.

I was tired of all the competitions and the snide remarks behind my back about my ‘little issues’ that my mother would talk about in the same breath as she’d say she expects me to go to the Olympics one day.

That’s all I was to her. Just a pretty little ball of expectations.

“It’s sick, but I’m really grateful to Sunset, you know?” I mumble. “The Entity saved me so it could eat me. She saved us all because that’s just who she is. And now, thanks to her, I get to live some part of my life as me, and even better—” I pull back and brush a strand of purple hair from Starlight’s face. “—I get to live it with you.”

“I love you,” Starlight says wetly as she wipes away the tears on her cheeks, then wipes at the ones on mine. “I really, really do.”

My throat is all closed up with something I can only describe as happy grief, and I nod as I lean in to press my lips to hers. She melts against me, and I fall in love again. Black and white. Blinding in all ways. That’s my whole life. But if it’s with Starlight Glimmer, then I think I’ll be able to deal.

So long as we're together.

Without warning, Starlight stiffens in my arms, pulls back, and presses a hand to her head, and I start to open my mouth to ask if it’s the noises again when I hear it.

I hear the sound that I know has been slowly driving Starlight insane since she got back. The nightmare sound that comes to her in waking hours and dreams alike, and my chest constricts with primal, animal terror.

“Sorry,” Starlight says. “The heartbeat’s back, and I know, I know, okay? It’s not—”

Her words die as her fair complexion pales several shades further at the look on my face.

“—real?”

“Trunk. NOW!” I snarl out the words as I kick the door open and punch the button that releases the trunk lock before scrambling out of the driver’s seat.

God damn bucket seats.

The murderous heartbeat pounds distantly at the edges of my hearing as I skid around the rear of the car and pry open the trunk.

Ever since we got back to the real world, I’ve compulsively kept up on my triathlon training and focusing heavily on my archery in case this scenario ever cropped up. The funny thing is, somewhere in the back of my mind I never thought it would. Even knowing there were murders happening and Killers running loose, a tiny, crazy part of my brain was praying that it would never come up and that, once more, Sunset Shimmer would take care of it.

We should be so lucky.

Either way, for the past year and a half, Starlight has been joining me in that training. She’s never trusted herself with anything like my bow or a firearm because of her occasional inability to tell when something is real or not at range. But the closer she is to it the more certain she can get, so me being the romantic girlfriend I am, I got her a machete as a gift to celebrate our third date.

Aren’t I just a peach.

Since then, my go-to gifts for her have been various types of sharp, deadly melee weapons, because I’m charming like that, and she’s developed perhaps an unhealthy obsession with mastering them.

“Bow!” Starlight shouts as she throws my black, carbon-fiber compound bow out of the trunk at me followed by a slim quiver of arrows.

I snatch both out of the air and secure the quiver just below the small of my back with the speed of long practice as I circle around and join Starlight at the trunk, nock an arrow, and start panning for threats while, behind me, Star arms herself.

We never go anywhere without being well-armed, maybe because both of us knew somewhere deep and dark that we’d be pulled back into the Fog one day.

Maybe that’s why I keep buying Starlight weapons, and why she keeps training with them, and why the trunk behind me has more in common with your average medieval arsenal.

The machete is there in its oiled leather sheath, and Starlight straps it to her waist at the same place my quiver rests on me. Across her back, she fastens a half-sheath that carries the Yakyakistani broadsword I’d bought her last Christmas, a heavy, hacking weapon made to inflict maximum trauma even against dense, heavy targets.

And gripped in her hand is the weapon she favors most of all: a genuine Neighponese Muramasa.

The blade catches the dull moonlight with a hungry flash of silver, and I shiver at the sight of it. There are legends that say those weapons are supposed to be cursed, and when I look at it, I understand why that is. There’s something deeply unsettling about the color of the blade, and the way that it gleams.

Aria owned the weapon originally, and she passed it on to Starlight as a token of goodwill, but she admitted something to both of us when she did it.

“I never liked holding that thing,” Aria had said one evening over drinks. “It felt too much like being back home.”

Whatever the case, Starlight demonstrated a class of skill with the weapon that left me breathless after only a handful of months. That’s part of how Aria and Redheart discovered how different we are from boilerplate humans.

We learn fast. Adapt fast. And violence is second nature now.

“Which one is it?” Starlight hisses as the knuckles of one hand go white around the grip of the blade while the other digs into her pocket.

“Dunno,” I mutter.

The Fog is closing in around us, thick and cloying and stinking of ash and blood. The heartbeat is getting closer and closer, slowly but surely, but it could be coming from anywhere.

“I can’t get a signal,” Starlight says as she looks down at her phone before cussing and tucking it away.

“How surprising,” I reply around a thin smile. “Or not.”

The Thief had clearly learned their lesson after Sunset called for backup, so they thickened the Fog ahead of their lackey enough to block outgoing or incoming signals.

“Up top,” I say, jerking my head back towards the car.

Together, we clamber up onto the roof of the old Corvette, and as we settle onto the high ground, we see it.

We see death in the Fog, and it’s wearing a stained denim jacket over a thin grey hoodie. If it weren’t for the pale, crudely cut mask, with its rictus grin and carved eyeholes, it wouldn’t be nearly as unsettling.

The Killer—the Legion—doesn’t move like a human. There’s a weird, languid grace to them that’s vaguely unsettling and reminds me of a leopard or some other lean, violent hunting cat approaching in the darkness of the jungle.

Fear of a violent and bloody death is a primal thing in the human mind and it always has been since we were huddled around campfires wearing furs and telling stories about the lights in the sky being gods.

Too bad the only god I’ve met wants me worse than dead.

“Can we win?” Starlight asks.

“Probably not.”

She lets out a brittle chuckle at my answer before looking over at me and nudging me with her elbow.

“Hey,” she says softly, prompting a raised eyebrow from me. “Smile for me.”

I snort, then shrug, and give her that wide, slash-mouthed grin that everyone else finds so unsettling, and that she seems to think, for whatever reason, is charming enough to love.

Then she moves.

Before the Legion can reach the Corvette, Starlight Glimmer bolts forward, flourishing her blade and catching the thin light of the Fog-drenched lamps across its wicked edge.

She’s fast—my Starlight is faster than most living humans. It’s the nature of being a Survivor. None of us realised just how strong and fast we were until we got back to the real world and got measured up against bog-standard folks.

Starlight’s blade snaps and bites at the air with whipcrack force as she lunges into a straight, killing jab at the Legion and if it had been human, it would have been skewered.

Instead, the half-born Killer moves with a sickening, frictionless grace as it side-steps the blow and strikes out. Between heartbeats, the Legion’s hand goes from empty to gripping a heavy hunter’s knife and suddenly they’re inside Starlight’s reach and guard, lashing out with a broad stroke at neck level, a throat-cutting strike aiming for vein and artery both.

But Starlight and I aren’t really human anymore either.

Star kicks her own legs out from under herself and drops to her back, prone and vulnerable.

No, not vulnerable. Never vulnerable.

Not so long as I’m here.

Two arrows sprout from Legion’s chest, burying themselves halfway into where their heart and liver should be and driving Legion back three steps as tainted blood spills from under the mask. They recover fast, though, as if two mortal wounds were barely an inconvenience, and pitch forward, but Starlight is already back on her feet and weaving a veil of cutting whispers in front of her.

I draw another arrow, then another, and another. The first two come to rest against the sight of my bow, and the last one hangs down between my pinkie and ring fingers, ready to be nocked the moment its sisters sing from the bowstring.

Counting the beats between Starlight’s steps with my breathing, I follow the measures until I find the pattern. One-two-three, one-two-three. This fight is a waltz of flickering steel and my Starlight is Terpsichore playing with knives.

Impossibly, Legion darts through Starlight’s guard, earning only a pair of shallow cuts on their chest and shoulder for the audacious move. Starlight doesn’t flinch, though. She backsteps, drops her guard, and kicks off from the ground before turning and twisting in midair, baring herself to the Legion’s blade.

My arrows leap from the bowstring, and the first one slams into Legion’s shoulder, stunting their attack, but the second isn’t so lucky.

Legion snatches the arrow out of the air a hairsbreadth from their chest, snaps the modern fiberglass shaft, and in the same movement they twist and spin with the blow of the first arrow and end with the heel of their foot planted hard in Starlight's gut as she lands.

“STARLIGHT!”

The blow plucks her from the ground and sends her straight back through the Corvette's windshield with a deafening crash. The glass shatters around her as she lands sprawled between the front seats, her arms bleeding freely from dozens of thin cuts.

That’s all I have time to see before the Legion is over the hood and in my face, its sharp, shallow, and ragged breathing muffled and phlegmy through its mask.

I flip my third arrow up, nock it, and release in a single snap of pressure that buries the arrow to the fletching in Legion’s stomach. It comes on heedless of the damage, furious and unstoppable as it buries its knife to the hilt in my shoulder and bears me down to the roof of my car.

We clatter off of the roof in a brutal embrace and slam into the asphalt. Legion lands atop me as my breath wheezes from my beaten lungs as the Killer twists the knife, then drags it out and slams it down into my other shoulder, nailing me to the ground before grabbing me by the forehead, and—stars burst across my eyes and blackness swallows me for a moment as the Killer slams the back of my head against the ground while they shriek in a raw, manic frenzy.

By the time they stop, I can barely move and I can’t rally enough coherency to think straight. My vision wags and swims and it takes me a moment to realise that they’re heaving me over their shoulder. The ground shifts drunkenly beneath me, and their boots make metallic crunches as the world jags while they clamber up on top of the hood of the Corvette.

Starlight is still on her back and groaning as Legion kneels and grips her by the throat, and from under the mask a voice, drawn reedy and ragged by abuse, hisses: “You’re coming with me.”

It kicks out the rest of the glass of the windshield and drags Starlight out of the ruined car.

Damn it.

Adagio is gonna kill me

Author's Note

If you want to know more about Starlight and Sour Sweet, check out their standalone story: The Crazy Girl.

Support me on my Patreon where you can check out chapters of my original novel, Bare Knuckles & Butterflies, as they're released!

Interlude 3 - 2 - Huntress & Hare

Aria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m sure it reminds Adagio of the same.

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

“And then Sunset came back.”

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

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

“It’s not her fault,” I mutter.

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

“I didn’t say it was.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because she’s Sunset Shimmer.

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

Who precisely…

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

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

“They know it’s us,” I say hollowly.

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

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

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

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

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

The rest of us aren’t so lucky.

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

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

“They’re here.”

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

The stink of the Trials.

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

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

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

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

“RUN, IDIOT!”

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

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

They were ready for her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pleased that I wasn’t that easy to kill.

Not that it matters.

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

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

Adagio!

“Thank Nodens,” I gasp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But they weren’t Survivors.

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

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

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

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

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

“Urk~”

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

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

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

Where’s the Heartbeat?

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

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

She’s not wearing a mask.

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

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

Interlude 3 - 3 - Closure

Fluttershy

Low, old voices crackle through the small apartment. They're voices of the past, voices from the forties or fifties maybe. I can’t remember when the movie came out, only that it came out before color television became really popular, so it’s all in black and white.

I can’t say as to why, but I’ve always liked old black and white movies.

If you watch an old movie, like The Bishop’s Wife, or one of those old noir films, and then watch a modern one from last year, the difference is jarring. There’s a kind of pace to old movies you don’t have anymore. Something about the way the camera cuts are slow and relaxed, and how the dialogue is measured.

Maybe I’m just being nostalgic.

“She’s late,” I say softly as I brush a veil of hair from my eyes and look down at my phone.

It’s not unusual for Rainbow to be running late as a general rule, but she rarely does it on date night. Even if we don’t go out all that often, we always make time to sit and watch a movie and cuddle on the couch.

Just thinking about how apologetic she’ll be makes me smile, though. Rainbow has a big guilt complex, and she’s probably already beating herself up for running late as it is.

I don’t begrudge her it. I know she loves me, so once in a while it’s okay for her to be late. Besides, I know the reason is because her job sometimes takes her to the back ends of Canterlot. Courier services have a high demand in this city, and Rainbow is good at her job, so she’s in equally high demand. The pay isn’t amazing, but according to Rainbow the tips are pretty good, and she always makes enough to put up rent and food, and still have enough left over to do a few fun things in the month.

Or to buy me a present.

That’s what she usually does.

I raise a hand to the latest one she got me a couple of weeks ago; a butterfly hairpin with understated little pink jewels in it that she got on discount from a pawnbroker she did a few jobs for. It’s beautiful, and I do love it, but the best part about it is the way Rainbow’s eyes sparkle every time she sees me wearing it.

My phone reads eight-thirty, which makes her half an hour late, and that’s the only reason I’m starting to worry.

She’s not usually this late.

Still, I resist the urge to call her. If she’s in the middle of a run, that will just make her later, and if she’s on her way home then I’ll just be delaying her because she always picks up if it's me.

A treacherous part of my mind still wants me to do it though. To ask where she is and where she’s been because a very small and awful part of me is worried that when she gets home she’ll be drunk or high, even though that’s never happened once in all the time we’ve lived together.

Rainbow would never do that to me, and yet…

I still worry.

“She’s fine.” I say it aloud because it feels more real that way. “She’s… she’s just fine.”

I set my phone down on the little coffee table and pause the movie before getting up to make my way into the kitchen. Tea. I think I need some tea to calm my nerves. Chamomile always helps, and Rainbow Dash likes it too. I’m sure she’ll appreciate having a hot cup of tea ready for her when she gets home.

Then we can curl up and watch a movie, and maybe after the movie we’ll go to bed and…

A blush creeps up my cheeks and brings a smile with it as I fill the electric kettle and set it to heat.

Being with Rainbow is never boring, that much is always true. With that said, in spite of her excitable nature and rough personality, she’s always so gentle with me. It’s nice, and I love her for it, but maybe tonight I’ll have the courage to ask her to be… to be not so gentle.

A sharp knock from the other room almost rattles the mug out of my hand as I pull it from the cupboard, and I turn to stare in the direction of the door. That's not Rainbow Dash; she has a key and never knocks. It’s not any of our friends either, because the few we still talk to don’t come around without saying something first.

And this isn’t a very good neighborhood.

The knock comes again and I swallow thickly before sidling around the island of the kitchen to the door and putting my eye to the peephole. It’s smudged and dirty, but I can make out a short figure in a hoodie standing at the threshold. A teenager maybe? A girl or a very slim boy, perhaps. I breathe out a soft sigh of relief. It's probably just someone who has the wrong apartment number.

“Uhm, c-can I help you?” I ask through the door.

The voice that comes back is one that puts a shock down my spine and settles ice in my stomach. It’s a voice I never particularly wanted to hear again.

“Can I come in?” Scootaloo asks, her voice sounds oddly ragged.

I bite my lip to keep from snapping. She's one of the ones who killed Sunset. She's one of the people who almost killed Rainbow Dash, too.

“I… I don’t think that’s a very good idea, Scootaloo,” I reply as calmly as I can. “You’re not welcome here.”

“I know.” Her words come out so calm and steady that it sets me back a step. “I don’t want to stay, I just wanted to talk to Rainbow for a sec, apologise and stuff, and then you’ll never see me again, okay? I promise.”

Turning, I press my back to the door and try to fight off the unpleasant words that are bubbling up from my gut and into my throat. I want to yell and scream at her. I want to tell her to go off and… and do something terrible. The very last thing I want is to let her and Rainbow Dash talk on the off-chance that it makes Rainbow backslide.

But it also might help.

Closure is a powerful thing, and Scootaloo used to be so close to Rainbow. Her betrayal hurt Rainbow almost as badly as Sunset’s death, and maybe this… maybe it could help her.

Heal her.

“She’s not here right now,” I say without turning.

“Can I wait?” Comes the muffled reply.

Being stuck in a small apartment with Scootaloo didn’t sound like my favorite way to spend Rainbow and I’s date night, but if I'm being honest, I've already made my decision. Rainbow deserves a chance at closure with Scootaloo and she also deserves for me to be here for it. And if it goes badly? Well, I’ll be here for that, too.

Taking a slow, deep breath, I turn and unlock the door.

Scootaloo looks nothing like I remember from CHS. She’s taller now, and coltish—all legs and elbows—and her face has an oddly lean and unhealthy look to it. Her dark hoodie is mostly clean, though, and she’s wearing a black denim vest over it, and as she lifts the hood away from her face, I wince at the deep bags beneath her eyes and the sharp angles of her cheeks.

“Are you hungry?” I ask, mostly out of habit and politeness, but a small part of me is genuinely concerned. She doesn’t look well.

“I’m fine,” she replies as I step back to let her in. “Thanks, though.”

I close the door behind her and follow her into the den. There’s a strange smell that follows her, and I wrinkle my nose as I try to place it.

“Woodsmoke?” I say as I finally put a finger on the scent. Then put a hand to my lips. I hadn’t meant to say it aloud but the moment my brain latched onto the answer it just fell out.

“Hm?” Scootaloo looks back at me with a raised eyebrow.

“Uhm, sorry, just… you smell like woodsmoke,” I say, forcing a small chuckle. “That’s all.”

“Oh, yeah.” She shrugs and cards her fingers through her short, ragged purple hair. “Pretty much the only way to stay warm in the winter is to burn stuff.”

For some reason, the way she says that puts a little ice cube in my stomach, and my memories go rogue on me, turning back to finding Rainbow Dash in that diner looking haggard and on the edge of death after having been homeless for months and spiraling down through a pit of self-destruction.

One of the worst days of my life.

“Mind if I sit?” Scootaloo asks, gesturing to one of the easy chairs, and I nod.

“Let me get you some tea, at least,” I say quietly. “It’ll warm you up.”

I don’t wait for her to argue. I just head back to the kitchen to take the hot water I’d meant for Rainbow and I, and pour out two mugs of hot chamomile with honey. I refill the kettle as the tea steeps. Hopefully, it will be full and hot again by the time Rainbow gets home. I get the feeling tonight will require a lot of tea.

Picking up the mugs, I head back to the living room. I set one mug in front of the couch for me, and the other in front of Scootaloo who stares down at it impassively.

Her eyes are glassy, and something about them unnerves me.

“So uhm… do you still live out in Whitetail?” I ask, flailing for some kind of conversation to fill the silence while Scootaloo toys with the teabag in her mug.

“Nah,” she replies casually. “My parents don’t even live there anymore. Not since they split up.”

I almost drop my mug even as I pick it up.

“W-What?” I set my mug back down as I try to find my tongue again. “When did that happen?”

Scootaloo shrugs. “Six or seven months ago, I guess, maybe more, I forget exactly when the papers were signed. Dad moved to Las Pegasus, and I think mom went back to Manehattan. She grew up there.”

“Oh.”

Awkwardness thy name is tragedy. Lacking anything else to do I pick up my mug and take a tentative sip as the silence thickens into something impenetrable. It hadn’t really occurred to me how far-reaching the effects of Sunset’s death would have been. I know how badly it wounded Applejack and Rarity’s families. I probably shouldn’t be surprised that the blow to Scootaloo’s ended up being fatal, in a certain sense.

Still, it’s a hard thing to hear.

Wait…

“You think your mom went to Manehattan?” I ask, turning to look at Scootaloo. “Do you live with your dad?”

To my surprise, Scootaloo actually starts laughing. It’s an ugly, brittle thing, and it puts a shiver down my spine as she rocks side-to-side in her seat. Her eyes are wide, and there’s something… odd… to them.

“As if,” Scootaloo scoffs. “Dad hates me. It was my fault they got divorced.”

“I’m sure that’s not entirely true,” I say, partially on reflex.

There’s that laugh again, and I realise it’s not so much brittle as it is bitter. Not so much ugly as angry. She’s angry, and I suppose in her situation, at her age, she probably has a right to be, even considering everything she and her friends had done.

“I think dad getting in my face and screaming at me at the top of his lungs about how this was ‘all my fault’ begs to differ,” Scootaloo says after a moment of grim laughter.

My stomach plummets, and I lower my head.

“Oh.”

It’s starting to feel like that’s all I can say. Despite everything, I almost feel sorry for Scootaloo. Okay, I do feel sorry for her. What happened with Sunset destroyed her life, at least for the time being.

“Are you living with relatives?” I ask, a real knot of concern starting to grow in my chest.

Scootaloo shakes her head.

“Friends?”

Another shake.

“Scootaloo?” I move closer and kneel down beside her so I can look up into those exhausted, glassy eyes of hers. “Where are you living?”

She curls up on the couch, tucking her knees up and covering half of her face as she stares down at me. Scootaloo’s gaze is a hollow thing, and it’s more unsettling than I want to admit. There’s something deeply and badly broken inside of her, and it reminds me of nothing so much as the first time I saw Rainbow Dash after she ran away from home.

Damaged.

That’s the word.

She’s damaged.

“I’m living somewhere safe,” Scootaloo says finally. “I’m fine. I just need to talk to Rainbow Dash, that’s all.”

Neither of us needs to say out loud that I don’t believe her, and as much as I hate to admit it, I don’t want her to go back to wherever it is she came from. I think doing that would be unkind.

On the heels of that thought comes that notion that I may have been being unkind for a long while.

“Let me get you something to eat,” I say softly. “And don’t tell me you’re not hungry. You’re skin and bones.”

Instead of replying, she asked again: “Where’s Rainbow Dash?”

Frowning, I shake my head and stand.

“She’ll be here soon, now stay here and let me get you some food.”

We don’t have much, but I’m sure Rainbow won’t begrudge a few of her courier snacks going to Scootaloo right now. I pull out a small bag of beef jerky, some almonds, and a couple of cheese sticks, and put them on a plate. It’s not a five-star meal but it’s enough to keep her going.

Gathering that up, along with a glass of water, I carry it all back into the living room where Scootaloo is sitting, unmoving and with her face still tucked against her knees, on the easy chair.

It’s a little eerie how still she is.

“Here,” I say, holding out the plate, “have something to eat… please? At least a little bit.”

Scootaloo eyes the meager meal, then takes it, and I have to hold in a small sigh of relief as she picks up a piece of jerky and some cheese, and bites into it.

My phone chooses that moment to ring on the table, and we both glance down at the image that pops up along with the caller ID.

Rainbow Dash.

“I’ll let her know you’re here.” I pick it up, and back into the kitchen before turning around to answer the phone as I lean against the counter.

//What’s cookin’ good lookin’?//

I groan. Rainbow Dash is many things but romantic isn’t one of them. At least not on purpose. She can be very sweet and endearing in the small things she does, but her idea of flirtation always falls on the wrong side of cheesy, which I think she knows and now just leans into.

“Nothing,” I say quietly. “I was waiting for you to get home before starting dinner.”

This time it’s Rainbow who groans over the line.

//Aw shit, that’s right… date night. Dammit, babe, I’m sorry, something came up and I just fuckin’—//

“It’s okay,” I say, cutting off her incoming tirade of self-flagellation. She could work herself into a froth later. “I uhm… something came up over here too, and I wanted to sort of prepare you.”

//Uh… okay? What’s up?// Her tone is lower and more serious now, and I can hear the eternal traffic of Canterlot humming away in the background.

“Are you close?”

//Few blocks down, yeah, I grabbed you one of those weird non-sodas from Neighpon you like.//

I snort and laugh softly. This is what I mean by Rainbow’s version of romantic. She can’t flirt to save her life, but then she’ll do something small or silly and it’ll just go to show she was thinking of you all along.

I really love that about her.

“Calpico is a Nieghponese staple, they’re not weird,” I say playfully. “A-Anyway… what I wanted to tell you was that we have company.”

An odd stillness travels over the phone in that moment that’s so intense I swear the line just went dead, and I’m about to ask if it had when Rainbow’s voice comes back a moment later. There’s a coldness to it now that I don’t recognise, and it actually takes me a split-second to realise it’s still Rainbow.

//Flutters… who’s there with you?//

I sigh softly, here we go.

“It’s Scootaloo, and she just wants to apologise, she—”

//Get out of there right now!//

I jerk the phone away from my ear and stare at it. Her voice changed. It turned cracked and wet, and I want to say it was some kind of static that did it but… but I’m not sure that’s really true.

//FLUTTERSHY I’M SERIOUS! RUN! JUMP OUT THE FUCKING WINDOW IF YOU HAVE TO JUST GET OUT OF THAT APARTMENT!//

My phone spits and starts with static and I hold it at arm's length for a moment before scowling and bringing it back to my ear. I can hear her running in the background.

“What is wrong with you!?” I say, fear and anger mixing. “It’s just Scootaloo! It’s—”

//SCOOTALOO IS DEAD!//

If it were possible for my heart to freeze over, that would have done it. I stare, dumbfounded down at my phone, then swallow hard and turn back to the den.

I stifle a scream at the girl I thought was Scootaloo, and who is now standing less than a meter from me with her dull, glassy eyes fixed on the phone as the connection crackles into static. Her gaze traces up slowly to fix on me, and now I imagine her complexion isn’t just sallow, but waxy and bloodless.

“S-Scoo—”

“Dash is right you know,” she says over me as she slowly unbuttons her vest until it’s hanging loose from her narrow frame. “It happened a while ago in the East End, six shots to the chest, and I was still awake after I died. I remember everything. The morgue, the autopsy, I remember mom and dad staring at me, and mom screaming.”

She unzips her hoodie to show the faded t-shirt beneath, and then lifts it, baring her chest and the ugly Y-incision cut into it that had been sutured closed with thick cord along with the six holes punched cruelly into her lean body, and I knew there’s no way she survived what I’m looking at.

It’s not possible, and I say so.

Scootaloo lowers her shirt, zips up her hoodie, and starts buttoning her vest again as she takes a step towards me. I try to stumble back, but I run into the island, and I swallow thickly as I look around the small apartment, trying to decide if Rainbow is right and if I should just jump out the window.

If it weren’t closed, I’d already be doing it.

“Our new mom needs her,” Scootaloo continues. “She needs Rainbow and the others who came out of the Fog, so, y’know, sorry about this—”

Fog boils out of the air before Scootaloo can finish. Her eyes narrow and, for the first time since she showed up at our door, something like real animation sparks across Scootaloo’s limbs and face as she rushes me, her face twisted in feral hate, and tackles me across the island to the other side of the kitchen.

Stars explode across my vision as my hard cracks against the cheap tile floor, and the next thing I know I’m being dragged to my feet by cold hands with a grip like iron. I flail and struggle, but even despite how thin she is I can’t move her.

She’s so strong… so much stronger than she should be.

“LET HER GO!” Rainbow’s voice comes bellowing out of the Fog that’s suddenly and inexplicably filling our apartment.

From out of that Fog, something I tentatively recognise emerges.

It’s Rainbow, after a fashion, but she’s not the same. Her courier’s outfit is gone, and in its place she’s wearing a long, mantled coat of brown leather with thick gloves on her hands, sturdy, steel-toed boots on her feet, and a heavy cowl thrown over her head. Her face is sunken around eyes that burn with unfamiliar gold when they should be a soft shade of cerise, and her mouth is twisted into a thin snarl as fury boils off of her like a palpable heat.

The gnarled cane in her right hand creaks as she raises it shakily to threaten the girl—no, the thing—behind me.

“I said,” Rainbow snarls, “let her go.”

For a long moment, Scootaloo doesn’t respond, but when she does it’s with a low, bitter laugh.

“Wow,” she mutters, something like real humor in her voice for the first time. “Guess ‘mom’ was too late for once, huh? You’re not a Survivor anymore, are you?”

“I’m better than a Survivor,” Rainbow says. “You’re about to find out just how much better.”

A cold, metal edge with ragged points like teeth presses to my neck, and I suck in a breath as Rainbow freezes. I glance down at the pale hand gripping the wooden handle of what I think I recognise as a keyhole saw, back from shop class at CHS.

“Flutters, everything is gonna be fine, okay?” Rainbow says softly.

“R-Rainbow?” The word comes out as a sob. “What’s going on!?”

“She doesn’t know, does she?” Scootaloo asks, and I can hear the smile on her face.

“SHUT UP!” Rainbow starts forward, then jerks to a stop when I let out a pained gasp as the teeth of the saw bite into the skin at my neck.

“You’re fast, Dash, but you’re not that fast,” Scootaloo growls.

Tears are streaking down my face, a wet heat that stains my cheeks even as I try not to swallow. I try not to even breathe. Tiny trickles of blood drip from the shallow nicks in my neck down past the neckline of my shirt as I try to focus on Rainbow Dash.

“Help me,” I sob.

She starts to nod, and as she does I see something change in her. Something under her skin shifts with a sickeningly liquid motion as viscous gold fluid dribbles from her nose and from between her lips like yellow froth.

I don’t know where my Rainbow Dash went, but that can’t be her. That thing looks, for all the world, like a diseased animal.

“I’m here.” Her voice is a wet, bestial rattle. “And I won’t let her—”

A red flash of pain rips across my throat with a sound like splitting leather, and suddenly the whole of my front is soaked in something, and I can’t get any words out. When I try to speak, the strangest gurgling noise is all I can make.

I look down at the drench of red that’s flowing down my shirt, then back up to Rainbow whose face is human again, and pale with horror. I don’t mind though. I prefer that to whatever was crawling up from beneath her skin. I don’t want to see whatever that was. I want to see her.

I want to see my Rainbow.

“Sshh,” Scootaloo murmurs as she cradles me back and hefts me in her arms. “You’ll be fine, I promise.”

My vision is fading as she looks up from me and over to Rainbow Dash.

“Move from there and she dies,” Scootaloo says flatly. “Only the Fog can save her now, so if you want her back then come find me in the cold.”

“I’m going to end you,” Rainbow snarls as the dark starts to take hold and a cold creeps into my limbs that's so pervasive that I immediately start to shiver.

The last thing I hear before I black out completely is Scootaloo’s voice, and it’s so grim and so terrible, that it breaks my heart.

“Promise?”

1.18

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.

Support me on my Patreon where you can check out chapters of my original novel, Bare Knuckles & Butterflies, as they're released!

1.19

“This is it.” I lick my lips and tense as the flavor of blood and ash settles over my tongue. It’s thicker than it has any right to be here, in a place like this that ought to be abandoned.

“No doubt,” Adagio mutters, tightening her grip on her ax.

Mount Ormond. The ski lodge serves as a grave marker for the wealth and ambitions of a wicked man driven to the depths of despair by three vengeful Sirens. Even just standing here on the edge of it all, I can feel the pulse like a diseased heartbeat deep inside the snowy, forested mountain.

“Well?” Rainbow says, her voice turning ragged and wet as her flesh warps and twists around her skeleton. “Let’s get in there! I’m not letting them put a hand on Fluttershy for one more second longer than I gotta.”

She moves forward, stalking furiously into the forest, and I grimace as I move to intercept her.

To my surprise, Ghostface gets there first, moving past me with an eerie silence broken only by the faint snapping of their almost-shadow cloak as they settle a dark hand on Rainbow’s shoulder and grip.

“Slowly,” they say as they pull back on Rainbow with more strength than I credited to their narrow body. “We go in slow and together, or we’ll be outnumbered.”

Legion may not be fully-fledged as Killers, but here? On their own home grounds? I highly doubt it would matter whether they were half, three-quarters, or full. They would have access to the full weight of their power in a place like this and the rest of us would be fighting on the back heel.

“The goal isn’t to win,” I say pointedly as Adagio and I catch up. “Our goal is the people they took, got it? Aria, Sour, Starlight, and Fluttershy. That’s the first goal, and everything else is secondary.”

For a moment, it looks like Rainbow is actually about to argue with me. Then the ire fades from her eyes, taking a touch of the unpleasant gold light with it, and she relaxes before nodding faintly.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah… that—that’s a good plan.”

The Killer in her wants to do what it was meant to do, and I can’t blame her. I want it to. I want to clash blades and draw blood. I want to drag everyone kicking and screaming into my nightmare. It’s an urge that’s written into my genetic code by the thing that made me. I can only imagine what kind of unique ‘urges’ Rainbow Dash was given in her role as a harvester.

Come to that…

“Hey, I can’t believe I’m only now asking this but,” I turn to Ghostface with a raised eyebrow, “what do you even do?”

Adagio turns with me and eyes the Entity-aligned Killer critically as well, her pupils darkening with her Huntress aspect. “A good question; what are you, precisely?”

Silence is our answer for just long enough that I think it’s all we’re going to get until Ghostface turns their twisted mask to us, their hollow eyes filled with shadow that seems to sink deeper and deeper and, against all reason, the moment they fix their gaze on me I feel…

Fear.

Their eyes are so empty, and yet not. There’s something inside them. Inside the mask and in the hollows of their eyes, something that’s twisting and moving. There’s a faint red gleam of hunger that digs at me. Digs deep into a part of me I didn’t even know was there. It’s like a knife at the soft meat of my belly, slicing through skin and muscle and the lining of my stomach to try and dig something out of me.

And I’m afraid.

Me.

I’m afraid.

“Don’t worry about it,” Ghostface says, before looking away and leaving me shaken. “I’ll do what I have to.”

For some reason, that puts a chill down my spine I haven’t felt since before my change. There’s something about this new Killer—this new priest of the Old Stain—that reminds me in the most unpleasant way possible of what it was like to be a Survivor.

To be prey.

Either way, I have no doubt they’ll live up to their promise.

We move through the woods on Adagio’s tail. Her expert eyes and hunter’s instincts guide us through the forest even where the path is swallowed by the snow and undergrowth. Through it all, she moves with preternatural silence, which’s spoiled only by the odd snatches of a hummed lullaby that escape her tightly clenched lips.

Every step we take thickens the scent of blood. If there was ever any doubt that the Thief had managed to craft themselves a real Trial, it vanished during that tense hike through those mountain forests.

“Guys,” Rainbow speaks up in a surprisingly thin voice, “I uh… I don’t feel so good.”

I frown and look back at her, about to admonish her for whining now, of all times, but stop at the grey pallor of her face. If she feels half as bad as she looks then she’s probably not kidding.

“Shit.” I turn to Ghostface who, to my lack of surprise, is moving with odd, lolling steps like the gait of a drunkard. “You too?”

“Yeah,” Ghostface groans. “Something is wr-wrong with this place. It’s getting hard to focus, I almost feel… sick.”

I narrow my eyes at the pair of them, then look to Adagio to confirm my theory. Sure enough, she looks fine. Tense and angry, but otherwise fine. I don’t feel any different either, and since all four of us are Killers, that only really leaves one major difference between my sister and I, and our ‘allies’.

“That figures,” I grumble. “The Thief must be using some of their power to hedge out the Entity’s influence.”

“Bullshit!” Rainbow snarls, then wavers as her balance shifts. “I’ve never even been to the Trials except that once with you! I was made into a Killer here!.”

I shake my head. “That doesn’t matter! You're still loyal to the Entity which means it still has a hold on you! If you die you have a ripcord straight to Tartarus!”

“I suppose that answers part of the questions as to what happens to us,” Adagio says flatly.

That’s a grim piece of intelligence, but I suppose she’s right. If these two are reacting like this to the source of their power being hedged out, then the fact that Adagio and I aren’t being affected means the Entity probably won’t be able to claim us.

Which begs the question: what does happen when one of us dies?

“You two,” Ghostface slurs, “how are you still stable? Your power comes from F-Father…”

“No,” I counter. “It comes from inside us—” I jab a finger at my chest “—Killers are living Fog machines, we—”

“What are you talking about?!” Rainbow snaps. “Killers don’t make Fog, Humans do! We use Fog.”

“How would you know?!” I snarl.

Rather than answer immediately, Rainbow stomps over to me, clearly fighting off a wave of nausea as she does, and shoves her hand into the leather satchel at her side. From within it, she draws out three vials, each filled with gold suspension and even from here I can feel the contents.

Hope.

Before this, we’d operated under the assumption that she was dredging out the Fog and that that somehow was fueling the Entity, but looking at the vials more carefully, I realise now that we were catastrophically wrong. Those vials don’t contain Fog. They contain distilled hope.

On the one hand, I know what I’m looking at is an abomination. It’s the hopes and dreams of however many humans she’s killed distilled into a slurpee for an eldritch horror.

But have you ever been just… so hungry? The kind of hungry where you haven’t eaten all day and then you walk into your friend’s house, take a deep breath, and just smell a cornucopia of good food? Your stomach rumbles and you salivate like a dog in front of a juicy bone, and all you can think of is that you have got to eat.

You can’t even think straight and you won’t be able to until you just—

“That’s close enough,” Adagio hisses.

A grip tightens on my shoulder and jerks me back, and I stagger as I realise I’d been walking dumbly towards Rainbow and her vials like an idiot.

“W-What was that?” I mumble as I try to clear my head.

“It’s what I take out of people,” Rainbow replies. “It’s that good shit, Shimmer, and it’s not Fog. If you’re making Fog on your own, then you’re more of a freak than me, and that’s saying something!”

“Enough,” Adagio repeats. “This isn’t why we’re here. If you can’t go onward, then stay back. If we’re all still alive after tonight then I’ll be happy to discuss the arcane theories of the Fog with you both at length.”

I clam my mouth shut. As much as I want to argue the point with Rainbow, Adagio is right. Whatever is going on here can wait until we’ve got our friends and family back safe and sound. If we all come out of this, so much the better, and if it goes poorly than some academic hemming and hawing wasn’t going to do us any good anyway.

“We’ll stick to the outskirts,” Ghostface says quietly. “If you bring one of the Legion down, bring them back here… I'll ensure they’re no longer a threat.”

“I don’t want them dead.” I fix Ghostface with a glare, but the Entity-sworn Killer just shakes their head in response.

“Don’t worry,” they say softly. “Killing them wasn’t the plan.”

For some reason, that bothers me more than if I’d had to argue the matter but, once again, we don't have time to discuss it. If Ghosty had a way to take Legion off the board as a threat and could do it without killing them for real, then all I can do is take it and deal with the consequences later.

Nodding to Ghostface and Rainbow, I turn and start making my way deeper toward the lodge on Adagio’s heels.

This is bad. We weren’t in great shape before, but now we were really outnumbered. If they ganged up on us we might not stand a chance at all.

“You know this might be a sacrifice play, right, Dagi?” I say, looking up at my elder sister as she strides confidently, and silently, through the forest.

“I know.”

If it came between our family getting out, and us, Adagio and I are on the same wavelength. Survivors survive. Killers die. That’s the play if worse comes to worst.

“I love you, Daj,” I say softly, “you know that too, right?”

Adagio slows, then stops and turns, and for a moment the dark eyes under her mask flash to a soft shade of berry. Only for a moment. Then they’re gone. Buried under the Killer called the Huntress who once gave the Red Forest a new meaning behind its name.

But she knows.

That’s all that matters to me.

The abandoned lodge of Mount Ormond is a desolate place.

There is no subtle approach to it. The thick evergreens don’t taper out as they close in on the tainted place, they simply end. One moment you’re moving through tight corridors of bark and undergrowth, the next you’re standing in a carved out hole in the mountains, nestled in a valley at the crook of the Canterhorn Range.

Remains of structures rest half-finished around the old construction site along with a sparse scattering of rocks and boulders which had probably been heaved out of the earth during placement of the foundations, and a handful of stubborn trees that hadn’t been clearcut for one reason or another, but served more as a reminder of what been torn apart than anything else.

And in the distance, not far from the treeline, is the diseased heart of this place.

The Lodge.

“Well, if we weren’t sure before…” I grumble as I step out of the tree cover with Adagio.

A hook juts jarringly up out of the snow and dirt, although it doesn’t look like any hook I’ve ever seen. The Trials I was in with the others—and even the few hooks I’ve seen the Legion conjure—all looked mostly like physical objects, albeit ones designed and built by a broken mind.

These have an ugly, squamous skin to them, something almost organic, and it makes my stomach twist just looking at them.

“Crude,” Adagio sneers. “The Thief must be dredging the bottom-most pits of their magic.”

“Maybe…” I don’t want to go near the hooks. Something about them repels me in more than just the physical sense. “Whatever, we need to—”

A scream splits through the air and Adagio and I both turn on our heels with the snap-reflex of a Killer, our senses honing in on the sound of a wounded Survivor. I bare my teeth, my sharp fangs flashing in the low light as my fingerblades clash.

“Keep yourself together,” I snarl. Adagio is stock still and clearly straining against her own instincts. “We won’t do our friends any good if we lose our minds and do Legion’s job for them.”

“I am well aware.” Adagio bit the words out, then shook her head and huffed, misting the air in front of her mask. “I’ll be fine… and so will they. Aria, Sour, and Star are veterans of the Fog, they’ll keep the newbie off the hook.”

I grimace at the thought of Fluttershy, of all people, hanging from one of the Entity’s butcher’s hooks. It’s an ugly thought, and one I don’t want to spend much time on.

“Here’s hoping,” I say quietly. “Let’s split up, find our family, and fuck off, okay?”

Adagio narrows her eyes under the mask.

“I know, I know,” I say, holding up my hands, “never split the party, I remember, but this is a smash and grab, and good Survivors spread out. I’ll head toward the screamer while you circle around and collect anyone straggling, then we am’scray.”

“That’s the whole plan?” Adagio asks, raising an eyebrow.

My fingerblades clash again as I scowl. “Well sue me! I didn’t have time to plan around half our crew getting kidnapped!”

I don’t wait for her to argue, I just turn and start moving as quickly as I can to the far corner of Ormond where I’d last heard the scream, and as I did I took a deep breath of the Fog.

This may not be my Trial, but it’s still a place of power for creatures like me.

“One~, two~, Sunny’s coming for you~.”

Here, there’s not so much difference between the Real and the Dreamtime. It’s all the same in the Fog. Even if I’m not as strong as I was on my own turf, I’ll still give these half-breed Killers one hell of a lesson.

Fluttershy

This has to be a nightmare.

This can’t be real.

Pain shoots through my side as I collapse against the creaking wooden wall of a half-built shed and press my palm to the ugly wound slashed across my ribs. It’s so deep that I can see flashes of white when I look at it, and there’s… there’s so much blood.

I slide down to my knees and start desperately trying to mend some of the damage, using what scraps of cloth I can make out of my shredded clothes the way the others showed me.

Somewhere in the distance, I can hear a heartbeat.

If you hear it, it means they’re close. The louder it gets, the closer they are.

Aria Blaze told me that. I don’t know where she ended up after we split, but she tried to explain as much as possible in as little time as we had before that thing came at us.

Legion.

I read the news, I know there have been murders around Canterlot, but…

The heartbeat ticks up in volume as I tie off the makeshift bandage. I clap a hand over my mouth, trying to stifle my groans as I move around the injury. I don’t even know how I’m still alive. I remember getting… getting stabbed, I think? I remember the knife at my throat and then the pain, I remember Scootaloo and Rainbow Dash, and then all I can remember is darkness.

And a voice.

In the darkness, there was a beautiful, terrible voice, and I remember the way it opened me up and—

My stomach heaves as the memory fractures in my mind. Something happened in the dark and I can’t… I can’t think of it. I can’t even remember it properly. But it doesn’t matter right now, I don’t have time to think of it. I just have to hide!

I sidle around the broken shed, doing my best to keep my hand over my mouth while I crouch and move towards a half-open locker. The heartbeat is getting louder now.

They’re coming.

Shivering in the mountain cold, I push the locker door open slowly, careful not to let it creak. It’s my only chance. There’s nowhere to go, nowhere for me to run. This place is wide open and if I try to make a break for it they’ll see me, and I know they can catch me.

Biting down on my lip to stifle myself, I climb into the locker and pull the door closed, shut my eyes, and start to pray.

How long has it been since I prayed?

Mom and Dad used to go to the little community church down the road from our house growing up, but they weren’t what you’d call devout. As Zephyr and I got older and life events started to crop up, church attendance started getting pushed more and more to the wayside until, eventually, it was more trouble than it was worth to try and get the family up to go to Sunday services.

But I still remember the sights and the sounds and the smells of the worship hall. I remember that odd scent that seems to hang around the interior of churches—all churches—regardless of denomination. I remember the hymns and the way a hundred voices, none of which could individually carry a tune in a bucket, would mesh together into something almost beautiful.

“God, please,” I whisper softly, daring a tiny bit of noise for the prayer. “Please… don’t let them find me.”

I bite down on the rest of my words and try to keep the sobs to myself. If I don’t, they’ll hear me, and then… then…

They’ll put me back in the dark.

Snow crunches nearby, and I choke on my own breath. The heartbeat is so loud now that it’s almost all I can hear. The heartbeat of the Killer is thunder in my ears and the only thing beneath that is the raw, ragged, animal panting of the thing under the mask.

Which one is it?

Scootaloo? Or one of the other two.

If they find me, I hope it’s Scootaloo, because she’ll just take me down. The others will play first… especially the one in the cracked mask.

The footsteps are growing closer, their tread biting into the hard, packed snow of the mountain with every step, with their ugly breathing punctuating their gait.

This can’t be real. None of this. It’s all just a nightmare.

It has to be a nightmare.

When the footsteps finally stop just outside the locker I’m in, I know they’ve found me. There’s nothing I can do, I can’t hear anything over the hammer of their heartbeat. I want to cry and sob and beg and plead for them not to hurt me but I know they won’t listen.

“God,” I sob. “Please help me.”

The locker crashes open, and I can’t keep in my scream at the sight of the cracked mask. It’s her. It’s the worst one. Of course, it’s the worst one.

A high, tinny giggle escapes the Killer as she slams her crude weapon into the wood of the locker’s interior right by my head, then drags it down in a slow, painful grind of cheap metal. Her free hand slams into my throat with bruising force, pinning me to the back of the locker and cutting my scream off into a choking gurgle.

“P-Pl-Please…”

“I’m going to hurt you,” she hisses, her voice high and cracking. “I’m going to make you bleed.”

“You first.”

A welter of blood gushes from under the Killer’s broken mask on the heels of a wet, meaty thunk, and her grip slackens. I drop from her grasp, sliding down to the bottom of the locker and bringing my eyes level with the five silver blades that are sticking grotesquely out of my attacker’s gut where they must have punctured out from her back.

Of all things… they look like fingers.

Author's Note

Wherefore, heroism?

Support me on my Patreon where you can check out chapters of my original novel, Bare Knuckles & Butterflies, as they're released!

1.20

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!

Support me on my Patreon where you can check out chapters of my original novel, Bare Knuckles & Butterflies, as they're released!

1.21

It’s a running fight this time. It seems cracked-mask finally got it through her fractured skull that I’m not an enemy she wants to get into a knock-down-drag-out fight with.

She strafes around me like a jackal, aiming for tendons and soft meat to sink her blade into every time she dives for a strike. I have to keep moving and sprinting between the sparse tree cover and displaced boulders to keep her in my line of sight.

Well, I guess Legion had to figure it out eventually. She’s finally cottoned on to the fact that, with her smaller profile, light-weight frame, and physical enhancements, she’s a lot faster than me.

We’re both fighting at a disadvantage now, though. I’ve kneecapped their little shell game now that I’ve identified and crippled Scootaloo. Now it’s just Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle, and if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say I’m better than ninety-nine percent certain this one is Sweetie.

I backpedal as she dives in for another swipe at my calf but skips back before I can land more than a grazing scratch. Not enough to really dig into her mind. If I could just sink my claws into her she’d be done for but that’s getting harder and harder with every passing minute.

It’s like she knows what I’m trying to do.

Wait…

Now that’s a thought.

I stop and clash my fingerblades together in challenge as the cracked-mask Killer I’m certain is Sweetie Belle circles frenetically around me. I resist the urge to keep our little sprinting chase going and focus on keeping her in my line of sight instead.

Sure enough, she eventually freezes.

Hot breath mists in front of her mask, and I imagine I can almost see her bright green eyes shining from between the fractures in her plaster face. Every inch of her is trembling with barely restrained violence. She wants to charge me, I can taste it in the air how badly she wants to cut me, but something is keeping her back.

Or someone.

“A gestalt consciousness,” I mutter softly. “You’re in each others’ heads… aren’t you?”

That would explain Sweetie’s sudden shift in tactics. Despite having exchanged no words, she somehow knows what I did to Scootaloo because on some level they must be aware of one another. Maybe it’s not something as sophisticated as communal telepathy, but it’s definitely a powerful awareness.

The instant I speak, something changes in Sweetie’s posture. She jerks and twitches like she’s listening to something in the distance. A moment later, she lets out a wordless snarl that turns into a shrill, ululating howl as she staggers back.

“Shit!”

I start forward but it’s too late. Whoever has a hand on Sweetie’s self-restraint must have heard me realise their secret! Why did I have to open my big mouth?!

Sweetie turns on her heel and pitches away from me, sprinting towards the main lodge of Ormond.

I don’t know for certain if I’ve severed Scootaloo from their strange link—probably not since they’re clearly aware of what I did and how I did it—but I’d put money on that restraining factor being Apple Bloom. Of the three of them, Bloom was always the most calculating, if not the most careful. Something most people never realised, even after those three were outed as Anon-A-Miss, is that Bloom is a planner, even if those plans are bad.

As I light off in pursuit of the much faster Legion, I can’t help but chuckle as I reflect on the fact that, really, Anon-A-Miss wasn’t even that bad of an idea. Juvenile, sure. Poorly evaluated for consequences? Definitely. But it played off the atmosphere of the school so well it’s actually impressive.

Apple Bloom probably knew that she didn’t have to make the profile perfect to make people think my new leaf had turned back over to the rotten side. The kids at CHS were already suspicious. They were already looking for a reason to hate me because no one had actually forgiven me. All she needed to do was give them the barest pretense to reject me and she figured they would latch on, and boy howdy did they ever. Maybe she didn’t mean to kill me but, in the end, she knew enough to make sure her plan would work.

A scream splits the air from the lodge and I curse as I force myself to speed up, burning precious magic to flicker myself forward, bypassing rocks, trees, and bushes to try and make up some of the distance, but she's so. damn. Fast.

My wet boots slip on cheap tile, and I stagger as I barrel out of the snow and into the mostly-covered ruin of what must be Ormond Lodge’s customer entrance from the decaying registration desk. Sweetie is still ahead of me, but barely.

She vaults the desk in a way I can’t hope to emulate, and sprints for the main den of the lodge. I’m forced to go the long way around, but as she hits the threshold of the den itself, something changes again.

The slightest twitch of her head like she’s listening.

Then she drops, folding like an origami crane as she collapses onto her knees and slides the rest of the way into the lodge across the dirty ground, and in that split-second that she falls away, a hatchet whispers over her head with a flash of Fog-forged metal to bury itself in the wall across from her.

A grin etches onto my face as snatches of a hitched lullaby reach my ears. Adagio is trying to keep a lid on her tic, but she can only hold it in so long, and it gets harder and harder the longer she stays in her Huntress aspect.

I come around the other side of the den to see my friends huddled back with Aria in front and Fluttershy in back clutching a ragged wound, likely from Scootaloo’s keyhole saw. Starlight is fussing over her while Sour watches Aria’s back like the good backup she’s always been.

Scootaloo is between them and Adagio in a standoff. Adagio can’t advance without leaving at least one of our group, if not more, vulnerable, and if Scootaloo chooses a target, it gives Adagio the freedom to focus.

Except now that Sweetie Belle is here, the dynamic has changed. Good thing I’m here too… but that still leaves—

I jerk to the side and spin on my axis, twisting myself around with my claws out on a wild hunch that follows at the heel of a memory of being jumped by a furious, knife-wielding psychopath in an alley not too long ago.

My instincts always were pretty good.

“Not this time!” I snarl as the third, missing member of Legion’s little troupe drops from the second-floor walk that overlooks the den with her hunting knife out and angled to take me at the skull or spine.

Reflexes or not, she can’t avoid me midair, and I snatch at her leg, gripping hard and bending the full weight of my Fog-fueled physical strength to tear her from the air, spin her around, and bash her bodily against one of the heavy lumber supports of the second floor before throwing her to the ground.

It’s her.

It has to be her.

Apple Bloom. I’m positive it’s her which means all I have to do is shut her down, take her out, and it will be over. Sweetie won’t be able to fight us without Bloom directing her, and Scootaloo isn’t strong enough to go toe-to-toe with a real Killer anymore.

Maybe this kills her for real. Maybe it doesn’t, but I don’t have the luxury of choice anymore, and neither does she. We made our choices already when we took the Fog inside of us.

I lunge at the dazed sister of someone who I had thought, once upon a time, to be among my very best friends, with all claws out and a snarl of rage—or maybe regret—on my lips.

And I miss.

My claws dig knuckle-deep into cold, dirty concrete through a sudden swelter of Fog that boils up from around the Legion that I’m sure is Apple Bloom.

“That’s enough of that…”

A shiver runs down my spine as I tear my fingers free of the concrete to look up. Scootaloo and Sweetie are both frozen in place and, true to form, Aria ignores the husky, chittering voice to take advantage of the sudden gap in Legion’s cordon. She grabs the other three, practically throwing them forward to break free and sprint to the other side of the den between Adagio and I, who quickly move to flank them with our weapons out.

“Shit,” I mutter as I move back until I’m next to Aria and in front of Fluttershy. “Is that who I think it is?”

“Probably,” Aria says dryly. “Just our luck, right?”

“Yeah,” I say quietly, then, “I’m glad you’re safe, Ari’.”

She shoots me that sideways smirk of hers, the one that warms me up a little from the inside only to bring me crashing back down just a tiny bit. I know she loves Redheart. One day, maybe I won’t feel like this about Aria, but until then I grin and bear it.

Aria is worth it.

I look away from her as the Fog congeals in front of us, vomiting out the staggered and dazed form of the Legion in her denim vest and hoodie, with her hunting knife still gripped tightly in her hand.

“Where are you?” I snarl, clashing my fingerblades as I scan the room. “It’s you, isn’t it? The Thief? The one who ripped a hole in the Old Stain’s power supply?”

There’s no answer, but the air has a strange flavor to it, and a tension that wasn’t there a moment ago. Something almost like amusement trilled through the atmosphere, and put my hackles up.

I wait another few beats for the chittering voice to reply or for some hammer of dark will to fall on us and force us to fight and die, or run. There's nothing. No threat. No more echoing words... fine then. I turn my attention back to the Legion.

Surprisingly, the one I thought was Apple Bloom is kneeling at Scootaloo’s side, pestering her over the wounds I’d dealt to her that aren’t healing right now that she's bereft of so much of her Fog.

“HEY!” I shout, and the three of them look up with an eerily synchronized motion. “Let’s talk… no masks.”

Cracked-mask scoffs and titters wildly, but cuts off as Hunting-knife makes a violent, slashing motion with her hand before standing and belting her blade in a leather sheathe. There’s a moment of pregnant silence as, I assume, the three of them commune.

The whole time, Cracked-mask never stops twitching, and as the moment stretches she gets more and more agitated until—“No!” It’s the first word I’ve heard out of her, and it’s a raw, ragged voice that says it, but it’s familiar. I was right.

Sweetie Belle.

Which means…

“Ah said,” Apple Bloom repeats aloud what must have happened internally as she reaches up and draws back her mask, “masks off, girls.”

Leading by example, as always, Apple Bloom grips her mask and pulls it from her face. Red hair billows out, framing a face that’s lined with more strain than anyone so young ought to have. Her cheeks are sunken just enough to highlight her sharp cheekbones, and the bags beneath her eyes only exaggerate the dull, glassy expression that’s settled deep into irises that were once the bright color of rose apples.

Scootaloo follows Bloom’s lead, pulling her own mask away, and if Apple Bloom looked gaunt, Scootaloo looks practically skeletal. Her skin is waxy, her lips are thin, chapped lines, and her hair hangs raggedly over her face like dry moss.

“I don’t want to.” The last one, who can only be Sweetie, huffs and crosses her arms over her chest.

“Don’t make me wrassle that thing off’a you again, Sweetie,” Apple Bloom says with the long-suffering air of someone who has not only made the threat before, but made good on it.

The two girls glare at one another for a long moment before Sweetie Belle lets out a defeated huff, grips her mask, and pulls it off with obvious reluctance.

Just for a second, I see Sweetie’s face behind that cracked visage; she has her sister’s beauty but it’s buried under a horror. Generous lips are pulled taut into a demented rictus of a grin, eyes that should be a soft shade of green are, instead, sharp and bright with madness, and the bouncing two-tone curls I remember from her Freshman year hang lank and heavy over features that are now more pallid that porcelain.

That expression lasts for all of a heartbeat before relaxing, and it’s like watching a chameleon fade into—or out of—sight, the way she relaxes into something bordering normalcy.

“Sorry,” Sweetie says, her voice now soft if a bit parched and raw.

Apple Bloom blows out a sigh and shakes her head.

“Ain’t nothin’, sugarcube,” she says quietly before looking back up at me, tracing her gaze up and down my Killer’s skin.

“It’s been a long time, Bloom,” I start, and she shrugs.

“Guess so.” The Apple Clan’s youngest daughter flips her hood back to card her fingers through sweat-matted red locks, shaking her head to free some of the worst snarls before looking back at me. “Welcome home, Sunset… Ah always wondered if ya’d make it back someday.”

“Oh, you know me,” I reply dryly. “I never know when to quit.”

Apple Bloom nods thoughtfully. Two years does a lot to a person, even one as young as her, and even aside from her physical appearance there’s something in the manner of her that’s changed on a fundamental level. Something that says she’s more careful… more patient maybe.

“So riddle me this,” I continue, pacing forward a little. “I see you three… and I heard your ‘benefactor’, but where’s your Handler? Why aren’t they here keeping you three in line?”

A palpable silence ripples out from the Legion as they look between themselves until Apple Bloom finally answers.

“Deathslinger’s doin’ their job.”

I raise an eyebrow. “Deathslinger, huh? Guess that fits, but if they’re doing their job and that job isn’t here—”

“You’ve got bigger things to worry about than that, Shimmer,” Scootaloo says in that dull, toneless voice of hers.

Letting out a snort, I nod.

“Guess I do… so I’m gonna maybe waste my breath here, but is there any way I can convince you three to turn-coat and stop murdering random passersby on the say-so of a crazy demonic demigod?” I ask, taking a tentative step forward and lowering my blades a little.

“Ain’t random.” A faint smile tugs at Apple Bloom’s lips. “And y’all really ain’t changed a lick, have ya, Sunset?”

Not random? That confirms one thing, then.

“Can’t change perfection,” I say as I relax back and shrug. “So is that a no? Or can we maybe have peace?”

The three girls share the kind of looks that only three people who have been friends long enough to have stopped needing words to converse can share. Whole sentences pass between them with a flick of a gaze or a minute shift of expression. I can see the question in Apple Bloom’s eyes, along with the knowledge that she already knows its answer, passed between Scootaloo and Sweetie who answer with their own microexpressions; a twitch of a lip, the shift of an eyebrow…

“Reckon we’re too deep at this point,” Apple Bloom says as she looks back to me. “Ah owe’er too much… we all do.”

She gestures out to the girls on either side of her.

“Something went wrong with us, Sunset,” Scootaloo chimes in flatly. “Something eating at us from the inside after we left your Trial… it got worse and worse until the whole world was just grey and empty.”

“I’m not going back to that, I can’t… I can’t be empty again,” Sweetie says, her expression tightening with fear and strain.

Shit, well it was worth a try. I had to do that much at least. A part of me wonders what that emptiness was. If it had something to do with the way they came into the Trials, via my nightmare magic rather than the normal route.

I guess it doesn’t really matter anymore. All of this is already my fault.

“You know I can’t just let you keep killing people, girls,” I say, clashing my fingers together as I take a half-step forward.

“Reckon y’can’t,” Apple Bloom agreed.

“You’re really going to make me do this?!” I snap. “You’re really going to fight me over staying a murderer?!”

Scootaloo and Sweetie both move up to Apple Bloom’s side, pressing up against the middle girl, and Bloom pulls them both in, settling an arm each on their waists to drawn them closer. Sweetie Belle gently lifts Bloom’s hood to settle it back over her head, and at the same moment Scootaloo takes the mask from Apple Bloom’s hands to press it over the farmgirl’s face.

“Ah’ll do whatever Ah gotta,” Apple Bloom rasps from under the mask, “t’stay with the girls Ah love… masks up.”

Well, that’s the end of that conversation, apparently, and I curse as Sweetie and Scootaloo both snap their masks into place, and all around me I can feel more than hear the faint echoes of the Thief’s laughter.

Fine.

Stepping back, I reach out and grab Fluttershy’s hand, and she jumps slightly as I grip hard enough to keep her from jerking out of my grasp.

“S-Sunset?” Fluttershy meets my gaze as I look at her over my shoulder.

Clenching my eyes shut, I briefly lift the first real prayer I’ve even thought about in ages up to the Scribe. ‘Written Word, strike my name from your book for what I’m about to do.’

“Hey, Flutters.” I say softly, tempering as much of the natural rasp in my voice as I can, and as I do I take a risk and draw back some of the Killer in me.

Just enough to show her my eyes—my human eyes—when I open them again, so she’ll know who she’s talking to.

“What’re you doing?” Aria hisses.

“What I have to,” I mutter back, before focusing on Fluttershy again.

“Look… I just wanted to say this before everything happens, alright?” I start again, and Fluttershy’s expression softens a little at my tone.

“Say what?”

Given how things are about to go, I owe her this much.

“That I forgive you.”

Whatever it was she thought I was about to say, that clearly wasn’t it. Fluttershy’s eyes go wide, and her jaw drops.

“For Anon-A-Miss, for what happened after… all of it…” I continue, “I forgive you for all of it.”

Fluttershy works her jaw soundlessly, and tears track down her dirt-stained face as she lets out a quiet sob. “Sunset, you… I-I don’t know what to say.”

As much as I don’t want to call this a plan, it is. It’s something I suspected ever since the alley. Ever since I realised the six of us were still connected, and what was connecting us. Ever since I asked the question about why Zephyr was targeted, and guessed whose apartment he was probably coming back from out there in the East End, and then found them, and how suddenly the Thief had found enough individuals for a full Trial ritual.

“Just don’t hold this against me, okay?”

“What?”

Written’s Quill, I hope I’m right about why the Thief wanted Rainbow Dash and why they settled happily for Fluttershy. I tighten my grip on her hand, and Fluttershy pales.

“Sunset I... I can hear your heartbeat.”

Everything happens in a single, aching instant.

The Legion pushes off from where they were perched at the far end of the Ormond Lodge den just as Adagio turns, her dark eyes widening under her mask as she hears the tone in my voice. I wonder if she guesses my plan.

“Sunset!” Adagio cries, maybe in warning, maybe to stop me.

I don’t know and I don’t care.

With the barest effort of strength, I let go of Fluttershy’s hand, and at the same time I give her a sudden push away from me, just enough to make her stumble back. The moment she does, I lock onto her mind in the dream world and flicker.

Fluttershy stumbles, and I can feel Starlight reaching out to try and stabilize her, but before any of that can happen I reappear behind my once-friend, tense every muscle in my body, splay the fingers of my right hand, and punch my blades, fist and all, straight through Fluttershy’s chest.

It’s a grotesque sound, like leather tearing and wood splintering all at once, and on the heels of it all, the faintest hiccup and gurgle from the ruined girl hanging limply on my arm.

Even Legion has frozen.

If it were any other situation, it might be comical. Apple Bloom is standing stock-still, mid-charge, her masked face sprayed with gore like the remains of a slapstick spit-take, and the other two are left reeling from their own—and their leader’s—shock tripling over on itself through their communed awareness.

The delay is enough.

Just barely enough.

“Sorry,” I say softly.

And for the first time since the Trials, I do exactly what I was designed to do by the thing that created me; I rip the pure, untrammeled, Fog-laced hope out of Fluttershy’s soul, but instead of sending it into the darkness, I sink my metaphysical teeth into it, and drink.

…

Holy shit.

The heavens crash and thunder, rocking the Lodge and throwing every person in it to the ground as I feel everything; there’s more pain and joy and hope and despair than any single soul is capable of, and it floods me in a heady and utterly unfiltered wave. Pure power spills through my veins, turning ice blue to fiery gold, and I want to hold onto it, to collapse the power into myself and drink and drink and drink until I’m greater than a god.

I could do it.

Here, now, and forevermore, I could do it. I’m surrounded by it!

Starlight, Aria, and Sour Sweet would be more than enough! I even have a Killer! I could scrape everything clean of Adagio’s mind, make her mine. Make her the Huntress she was meant to be! And then I would be free! I would… I…

I could do it, and all it would cost is the last shreds of my humanity and the souls of the only people who have ever loved me.

So I pull back. I pull away from the all-consuming hope, sink my claws into it, and dump all of that power into one of the most graceless, brute force spells I’ll ever admit to casting in my life.

“TIME TO EVEN THE PLAYING FIELD!” I snarl as I rip my arm free of Fluttershy, step back…

…and hammer the sum-total power of the Element of Kindness straight up into the ambient matrix that’s anchoring this Trial realm.

For the second time in my life, I steal from a god.

Author's Note

Self-preservation is paramount - at any cost!

1.23

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.

Support me on my Patreon where you can check out chapters of my original novel, Bare Knuckles & Butterflies, as they're released!

Act 1.0 - Epilogue - Demise of Faith

Rarity

My head is pounding when I wake up, but that’s been the manner of things for a good while now. I feel like I never sleep right anymore—it’s the dreams, they wake me up more often than not, so I rarely sleep more than a few hours at a time, and only after long periods of staying awake. With that said, the fact that they wake me up is a mercy, really.

It’s so much worse when they don’t.

I stumble as I stand and my head swims. At the same time, my stomach chooses to make it known to me that I haven’t put anything meaningful in it besides those horrendous energy drinks in about a day and a half.

Neighponese takeout, I think, was the last thing.

“Oh, dear.”

My stomach flips and I clap a hand over my mouth as I sprint for the bathroom, shoulder the door open, collapse in front of the toilet bowl m, and dry-heave spatters of bile into the water.

Agony rips through my guts as my stomach twists and turns, clenching and unclenching as it seizes and searches for something to bring up, there’s nothing there but acid.

So that’s what I get.

Back when the only time I threw up was when I was sick with the stomach flu or something like that, I’d always feel a little bit better after having to throw up. It was never a positive experience, mind you, but it served a purpose. I had something in me that needed out, and I got it out, and then I felt better.

It was comforting to look at it that way, as a child.

Now, I’m not a child anymore, and I feel so much worse than before I’d finished retching and collapsed to the floor of the bathroom.

At least the bathroom tiles are nice and cool.

“I… really should drink more water,” I mumble dazedly as I stare at the outside porcelain curve of the u-bend. “Or stop drinking those dreadful things.”

I won’t, though. Coffee isn’t enough anymore. Neither is soda. Most energy drinks aren’t even strong enough. Every time I close my eyes, I see either Sweetie Belle or Sunset, and I’d rather drink nothing but Hellion for the rest of my life than have to face those stares every night.

At least when I find Sweetie, I’ll be able to apologise.

That’s what I tell myself; as if she hasn’t been missing for months.

My phone rings, blessedly distracting me from my own head, and I force myself up onto my knees, then onto my feet, and stagger out of the bathroom. Maybe it’s just a spam call, or maybe it’s the police telling me they found her. I can’t really afford to take that gamble.

“Yes, yes, I’m coming,” I groan as I slap the light switch, and then cuss viciously as the fluorescent lights stab at my eyes.

It’s pitch black outside, and the oven light in the kitchen marks the time as a little after four in the morning as I sweep up my phone from the counter, look at the caller ID, then freeze, and reread it.

Rainbow Dash

I can’t think of a single positive reason that Rainbow Dash would be calling me at six in the morning. But I also can’t imagine she’d be drunk-dialing me to weep over fractured friendships, especially since Fluttershy has been so vocal about how Rainbow’s improvement had really stuck.

So I swallow my dread, tap the answer call at the last second, and lift the phone to my ear.

“Rainbow, darling it’s early, are you alright??”

The sound of sniffles and harsh breathing precedes her raspy voice.

//I uh… h-hey Rares, uhm, n-nope, I’m not.// Rainbow’s voice is thick with tears, and it puts a knot of ice in my chest to hear it.

Mostly it’s because I can’t think of any reason she’d sound so shattered unless something had happened to Fluttershy.

“Talk to me, darling,” I say, and I’m reasonably impressed that I’ve kept the quaver from my voice.

//Sh-She’s in the hospital, Rares.// I swear my soul freezes over. //And uhm… shit… Rarity, Sweetie is here, too.//

My mouth goes utterly arid, and I can’t even taste the backwash of sick that had been painting my tongue and gums a moment ago as my brain reels and processes those words.

Sweetie. My Sweetie. My sister.

The phone clatters out of my hand as I bolt out of the door, barely pausing to grab the keys to the car. Vaguely, I’m aware of Rainbow Dash calling my name over the phone, but I can’t focus. I can’t process. I can’t tell where it’s coming from or why I should even care.

My sister is alive, and that’s all I can grasp.

If I’m being fully honest, I have no idea how I got to Canterlot General in one piece. Have you ever been so tired after a double shift, and you know you still have to drive home, and just the thought of making the drive is like an anchor around your neck? But you have to do it. If you want to get to bed you have to drive.

So you roll down the window, max out the volume on the radio, and struggle to keep your eyes focused on the road, and then…

Bam.

You’re home.

You have brief, firefly-flash memories of stoplights and making some familiar turns here and there, but that’s all. Past that, there’s nothing, and if you really, really stopped to think about it, it would probably—and reasonably—scare the shit out of you that you actually drove in that state.

I don’t even remember the stoplights.

What I do know is that I park sloppily in the lot in front of the Emergency Department, half-fall out of my own car, and scramble for the doors looking like an absolute maniac.

Fortunately, this is the lobby of Canterlot Emergency Department, so I don’t stand out enough to warrant being ejected by security.

“My sister!” I gasp the words out like they’d been lodged in my throat for six months as I stumble up to the front desk. “S-Sweetie Belle, h-her name is Sweetie Belle, please! I g-got a call that she was here and—”

“Miss, please.” The poor young woman at the desk puts a hand up with a fearful look in her eyes. “I need you to calm down and take a breath.”

“I don’t need to breathe!” I shriek. “I need my sis—urk.”

Whatever air I have in my throat cuts off hard under a steel-corded grip of fingers wrapping around my throat, while another hand seizes my arm, wrenches it behind my back, and hauls me bodily away from the desk.

“Okay, Bipolar Barbie, let’s go.”

What I expect is one of the two burly security guards who’d been at the front door to be pulling me away. What I get is a familiar flash of violet hair cut into a sharp bob with a widow’s peak like a blade’s edge, and bitter, furious eyes like amethysts.

Aria Blaze, wearing a long white doctor’s coat drags me through the lobby, getting a few odd looks from both staff and patients.

“Don’t mind me,” Aria snaps at one of the approaching guards. “This one’s going to Behavioral and no, I don’t need help.”

One of the guards clears his throat. “Uhm, D-Doctor Blaze, that’s really not—”

“Did I stutter?!”

I get a brief glimpse of the guard stepping back before I’m hauled through the doors of the Emergency Department’s patient access and all but thrown on the hallway floor.

“I have had a really shitty night, powderpuff, okay? So I’m gonna need you to Pull. Yourself. Together.” Aria snarls. “Or so help me, I will kill you myself.”

My vision doubles as I drag air into my lungs, and massage my bruised throat. The woman standing in front of me isn’t the one I remember from CHS. It’s not even the one I remember stumbling out of the portal the day Sunset stole souls from the mouth of Hell.

This woman is grimmer, harder-edged, and angrier. There’s something boiling under her skin that I can’t put a finger on and it chills me to the bone.

Aria takes two steps back and leans against the inward-swinging doors of the hallway and crosses her arms. Her eyes are cold enough to bite, but I force myself to stand. As I do, Aria’s eyes flick up and down.

“Pajama pants, huh?” Aria asks calmly.

“W-What?” I look down at myself, and despite the situation, I flush.

I’d forgotten that I’d dashed out of the house wearing nothing but what I’d fallen asleep in, which truthfully wasn’t much. A pair of lavender and white striped pajama pants, socks that were soaked with snowmelt and mud from the outside—God, I’d forgotten to even put on shoes—and a top sheer enough to put my father in his grave if he knew I’d gone out in public in it, and it’s only then that I realise how absolutely freezing I am.

“Oh.”

A flutter of fabric ripples through the air and a shadow falls over me, and a moment later a white coat, warm from body heat falls across my shoulders. With the heft and length of the coat, I hadn’t realised how Aria was dressed back in the lobby—most likely, she moved too fast for anyone to register it.

A dark muscle shirt clings to her torso, and her fatigue bottoms are tightly secured with straps. At her waist is a heavy knife, and all I can think about that is that they really don’t check the employees of the hospital well enough for a so-called weapons-free medical campus.

None of that is what startles me, though. See her now, like this, I realise how dangerous she really is. Her arms and shoulders are tense, and in their tension, I can see pound after pound of corded muscle straining, and suddenly I understand why I could barely move once she got her hands on me.

Aria has the muscle structure of a boxer or an MMA fighter.

“P-Please,” I start, my voice cracking slightly. “I wa—I need to see her!”

“No can do, Miss Belle, because you have a few questions to answer before I can do that, and believe it or not, this is me doing my job,” Aria says grimly.

My stomach flips again. I don’t need to ask what the questions are. I can guess. “Please, I didn’t know.”

“It’s cute you think I’d take your word on that, or that I care even if you didn’t,” Aria says flatly. “So let me lay it out for you, your sister was brought in by Lifeflight, and she's down the hall, third door on the left, in room forty-one, waiting for transfer to third-floor med-surg, and in room forty is Apple Bloom, who came with her.”

I blink as her words sink in. “W-Wait… Apple—so she did know!”

Of course, I suspected she knew where Sweetie was, but I had no way to act on it. The few times I managed to talk to her, to ask if she’d heard from Sweetie, the answers were always a variation of ‘no’ with the occasional ‘why d’you care?’ which hurt mostly because it was a fair question.

“Wait, why is Apple Bloom in here?” I ask, a tell-tale itch scratching at the back of my head as I tried to piece everything together. “What happened?”

Aria gives me an arch look that makes my blood simmer. Something about her classical beauty really gives her a grade-A snobby smugness when she wants to show it.

“Because we put her here, just like we did to your sister,” Aria explains quietly, and the simmering feeling hits a boil for a brief moment before— “after all, someone had to stop them from killing.”

My stomach plummets.

“Stop… w-what?” I stammer. “You’re not—”

Something clatters in front of me, and I look down. A mask, cracked in three large sections and bound together with corded steel wire, lays on the ground in front of me stained with blood, and beside it is a metal ruler stake with what looks like…

“S-Sewing needles?” I mumble staring down at the horrible implement.

I put a hand on it and shiver at the chill that goes up my arm.

“Careful, one cut from that and you’ll bleed like a Czar,” Aria says calmly.

My mind pieces together the clues from what I’ve been gathering. Everything regarding the serial killings had been tertiary to finding her. I’d only really kept track of them because I’d been desperate to make sure Sweetie’s name didn’t end up on the list of victims. Every time a new killing was reporting, my heart had plummeted as I imagined Sweetie’s face decorating a headline, only to rise with grimly vertiginous satisfaction when I would see it was someone else’s loved one, and not mine who had been murdered.

“Legion,” Aria says. “Sweetie and Apple Bloom.”

“Why?” I ask quietly as I slip my hands under the mask and slowly lift it. I imagine, somehow, that I can feel Sweetie Belle in it like I’m hearing an echo of her voice from far, far away.

Blowing out a breath, Aria cards her fingers through her hair and sighs.

“They were infected by the Fog, like me and the others who got out the Trials, but that’s not really why,” Aria replies.

She kneels and gets an arm under me to start pulling me away from the door until she finally gets me through the doors of an empty room and drops me next to the exam bed.

“That’s why I need to know…” Aria continues. “See, there’s a reason some went apeshit and started murdering people, and others stayed chill… it’s because the Fog is like a loudspeaker for your despair, and for a Survivor to go full Killer? Well, you’ve basically gotta have nothing left in you but despair.”

That’s when she draws her knife. It’s a whisper of a sound, and the gleam of it draws my eyes to the wickedly sharp edge.

“So I’m going to ask you this once, and I’ll know if you’re lying when you answer me… were you abusing Sweetie Belle? Or did she put all those cuts on herself?” Aria’s grip went white-knuckled on her knife.

I hate that it’s taking me so long to answer. I should be able to say no, of course not. I would never, and did never, lay a hand on my sister. Except, I know the truth, don’t I? Don’t I know that that’s not all there is to the matter?

“Will you still kill me if I say that… I think the answer to your questions is simply, ‘yes’?” I say hollowly.

A bitter laugh escapes me, and tears come hot on its heels.

“Did I beat her? Put out cigarettes on her arms? Did I take sewing needles to her arms and use them to dig into her skin the way she did?” Every word tastes worse than the vomit I’d just sicked up, but I force them out anyway. I need to say it all. I need to. “Of course not, darling, I’m not so crass as that. I’m much worse, I think. What I did was look away from the bruises on her face and arms every day she came back from school. What I did was fail to offer her even a scrap of comfort even as I watched the light die in her eyes.”

It had been so easy, too. To just do nothing. To tell myself that Sweetie was just reaping the rewards of ruining so many lives, so many relationships, and so many friendships. All I had to do was ignore her and pretend she was a stranger in her own home until I finally made her understand that she wasn’t welcome anymore.

“I caught her, you know,” I say quietly after a long stretch of silence. “Months after the fact, it was a little after Scootaloo died, I came home abruptly and found her in the bathroom—” my stomach lurches, and I dig my fingers into my scalp, gripping the strands of my hair as I see it again, that image burned into the back of my eyeballs “—with her arms full of sewing needles as she pushed them in and then dug them out with her b-bare fingers…”

I’d thought I was having another nightmare at the time, to be honest. It was grotesquely fascinating for the brief moment that I wasn’t sure it was real, and then the smell hit me. Copper and antiseptic. That’s when I knew it wasn’t just another awful dream. That was when I snapped.

“God, I screamed at her… I screamed such horrible things, I c-called her such horrible things,” I sob. “B-But I was just scared… I d-didn’t mean them!”

“And let me guess, the next time you went to look for her…?” Aria ventures

“She was gone.”

“Tch, fuck,” Aria clicks her tongue and sheathes her knife. “Well, at least you’re just a moron and not a monster, because honestly after the shit you all pulled on Sunset it was even odds in my head.”

I press the mask to my forehead; it’s so cold. The material feels like smooth plaster that had been left in the freezer overnight. I don’t have to ask to know that this is her mask—Sweetie Belle’s mask.

Aria sighs and curses under her breath.

“Look, powderpuff, I know you’re going to be asking yourself a lot of questions, so I’ll save you some time, but don’t hold it against me, alright?”

Aria kneels and brushes the mask away from my face. I hate how infuriatingly calm she looks. I hate it because it feels like every inch of my insides is on fire.

“The answer to that soul-gnawing question in your head is ‘yes’,” Aria says. “You and the hayseed could have stopped this from happening, all you had to do was treat your sisters like fucking human beings, okay? Give them some hope to counter the despair. It would’ve been hard, and it would’ve sucked, but that’s how we’ve kept ourselves sane… well,” Aria’s expression shrouds grimly for a moment, “—most of us, anyway… some people don’t want the help.”

But I could have tried. That’s what she’s saying. All I had to do was try to extend a hand of pity to my sister, and it could have stopped all of this. I try not to think of the sheer number of victims the Legion accounted for.

All of those people.

They were all victims of my cruelty.

“This is how it works,” Aria says quietly as she stands. “This is how it’s always worked—misery and hatred are one big, stupid circle until someone breaks it… I swear, you humans never learn.”

She doesn’t say another word, Aria just watches me for a moment, then scoffs, turns on her heel, and walks away.

Miserable. I feel so miserable. I feel like all I can do is reach into my gut and pull everything out and yet it won’t ever, ever be enough. All this time I really believed that if it came down to it, my better angels would win out and I would be the bigger person.

How absolutely galling it is to have that faith so utterly shattered.

I don’t know how long I sit there on the floor of that emergency room, but by the time I get up my legs are aching and I have pins and needles in my extremities. I feel drained as I finally stand and look down at myself, and take a moment to appreciate what a miserable sight I make.

My skin is dull and patchy with scratches and nicks where I’ve picked at it, and there are rashes in places too, thanks to a few too many missed showers. My hair is lank and oily, and my throat is so raw that it aches.

I’m probably getting sick, but honestly that’s not much of a surprise.

Stumbling out of the room, I dredge my memory for the room that Aria said she was in—forty-one, I think.

The memory is confirmed as I turn the corner and spot Applejack sitting outside room forty, where Apple Bloom had been settled, wearing a haunted look on her face that I half-suspect is neatly mirrored on my own.

I don’t acknowledge her as I pass her by, and she doesn’t react, but I know she knows I’m there. Maybe it’s a mutual understanding. We can’t. Not yet. The look on her face is all the proof I need to know that Aria has already spoken to her and probably given her the same dressing down she gave me.

In a way, I am grateful to her. The constant asking of that question: ‘could I have saved her’ would have eaten away at my sanity. Of course, the truth of it is that when someone is asking themselves that question, they’re doing so in the desperate hope that the answer will be ‘no’ because the alternative suggests a failure on a scale most people simply aren’t equipped to deal with.

So now, rather than a gnawing madness, it’s a cancer. A rot eating slowly and inexorably at my insides.

I push the door open, forcing myself to face the weight of my decisions, and to my surprise, I find I’m not alone. A woman is inside, and for a moment I think she’s a doctor, but her casual clothing immediately puts that to a lie. She’s short and a little scruffy—although I’m hardly one to talk—wearing a thick sweater, worn jeans, and scuffed boots, and her purple hair is done up in a messy bun.

And she’s standing over Sweetie Belle.

“Uhm, p-pardon me, but are you in the right room?” I ask wearily, wincing at how my voice cracks.

When she turns, I swear I lose ten years off my life.

Her name is almost past my lips before I remember myself. Before I remember the last few times I talked to Applejack before I lost myself in my search for Sweetie, and she told me she’d met the human version of Twilight Sparkle.

“Oh, uhm, hello,” Twilight says shyly, and I can’t help but smile a little.

She’s a little frumpier than her Equestrian counterpart. There’s nothing Princess-ly about her at all. Thick glasses sit perched on a button nose over eyes that are wide and curious, although right now all they look is sad. Her cheeks are full and soft, and even with her sweater I can tell she’s a little on the heavier side—but only a little—and she carries it well.

It’s cute on her.

“You’re… Rarity, right?” Twilight asks after a moment. “I’ve seen a few pictures, but…”

“I suppose Applejack doesn’t talk about her old friends that much,” I venture.

Twilight shakes her head, and the worried frown that flashes over her face tells me more than any amount of explanation could. Applejack wears her pain poorly, she always has, and now there’s so much of it that I’m truly afraid it will kill her one day, the way it did her father.

At least she has Twilight.

“May I… ask what you’re doing in here?” I say, and I know I’m just stalling. It would be easy to go to her side and see the figure lying on the bed behind her, but I’m not quite ready yet.

Soft lips press to a thin line as Twilight glances back behind her briefly before she returns her gaze to me.

“I told Applejack I’d check on her, she’s…”

Of course.

“She doesn’t quite have it in her?” I ask, and Twilight nods.

She’s not the only one, but needs must. I’m all Sweetie has, and it’s about damn time I start acting like it. Swallowing thickly, I force myself to take another few steps forward to the bedside and look down.

If it weren’t for the quiet chime of the EKG machine attached to the bed, I would have thought she were dead. Sweetie’s face is sunken and pale, and the skin is so dark around her eyes it looks like she’d painted them with kohl. She looks like she hasn’t slept right in weeks, if not longer, and certainly hadn’t been eating.

“The uhm… the situation, I guess, is the same as with Apple Bloom,” Twilight explains softly. “The surgeon, Doctor Blaze, says they’re both in a coma, but that they’re lucky they’re not dead.”

Aria is a surgeon? It’s news to me, but then I suppose it has been years. Plus, those three, the Sirens? Weren’t they immortal? A medical doctorate wasn’t out of the question then, although it surprises me that it’s Aria who holds it.

“Did she say when they would wake? Or…” I trail off.

I don’t have it in me to ask the last part of that question, but fortunately, I don’t have to. Twilight just frowns again and shakes her head.

“I’ll… I’ll leave you alone, okay?” Twilight says after a moment, and as she turns she puts a hand on my shoulder and grips it tightly. “I’m sorry this happened, but everything is going to be alright, I promise.”

I scoff, but rein in my derision. She doesn’t deserve that. She’s so kind, and I hardly deserve it, so instead I turn to her and try for a smile. I think I almost succeed.

“That’s very good of you to say, darling,” I reply. “Thank you.”

It’s only after she leaves that I collapse. I fall to my knees, finally letting my legs give way under the weight of my grief as I reach out carefully to put a hand on Sweetie’s thin arm. I brush the skin gently, feeling my gorge rise again as my fingers find old, ugly ridges of scar tissue beneath them. They’re bitter, brutal things, those scars—symbols not only of despair but of my own failures as both a sister and a human being.

Aria was right. All I had to do was treat my own flesh and blood like a human being, show her a little compassion, and all of this could have been avoided.

Sure that hadn’t been asking for too much?

How can I explain to her, to any of them, that every time I looked at my baby sister, all I could hear was that awful sound of meat and gristle and bone striking concrete? How can I explain that in the deepest, bitterst, and ugliest parts of my heart, a very small part of me thinks that Sweetie Belle deserves this.

For the second time that morning, I lose time, maybe half an hour, but I’m not sure. The seconds tick away on the tinny chime of the EKG until I can’t stand it anymore. Maybe a better person would have found something meaningful to say to their comatose sister in that time, but I think I’m coming to the realisation that I’m not a better person.

I don’t even know if I’m a good person—or even an okay person.

As I push the door open, a faint echo reaches my ears. Arguing voices, and on instinct, I stop. I’m an awful gossip, and if I’m being honest this isn’t the first time I’ve let my curiosity get the better of me and listened on somewhere I probably ought not to have been, but, well… hm, I suppose maybe that should have clued me in to my nature sooner, but we’re all blind to our worst flaws, as they say.

So I listen, I pick out Aria’s voice most clearly.

“…you think it’s funny? Coming here? We know what you are now.”

Hearing Aria threatening someone doesn’t surprise me, what surprises me is the voice that answers back. It’s one I had been speaking to just a little while ago, but the tone and timbre to it is completely different.

Twilight doesn’t just sound cold… she sounds almost alien.

“Are you sure you want to start this here?” Twilight asks softly, and there’s a strange quality to her voice. “We’re in a hospital, there’s a lot of despair in places like this.”

“You—!”

“Call it a truce for now,” Twilight says, her voice still oddly thin and tinny. “I’m here for my girlfriend, and then we’re leaving, that’s all.”

“That’s ‘all’?” Aria’s tone is tight with fury. “After what you did? After everything you’ve done?”

A low, ripple of laughter filters through the door I’m pressed against, and while intellectually, I know the laugh belongs to Twilight, my mind can’t really match up that weird, chittering quality of it to the woman I just spoke to.

“Hospital, remember? I’m in no condition to do this and neither are any of you, but if it comes to it I think my odds are good.”

I can actually hear Aria choking on her own rage. Part of me is horribly curious about what those two have between them that’s so contentious, and the rest is truly afraid to find out.

“I know where you sleep,” Aria hisses, finally.

Another laugh. “Bold of you to assume that I sleep, but by all means, come by for dinner, I’m sure picking a fight with me where I’ve been living and setting up for the past year is a perfectly safe and logical plan.”

“Enough.”

My blood absolutely freezes at that voice.

Impossible.

I know that voice. I hear it in my dreams every night that I can’t stave off sleep with stimulants and work. It’s different now, but not different enough. It’s a little older and a little more tired, but I would know that warm husky voice anywhere.

“Nightmare.” Twilight says the word like both a name and a greeting.

“Thief.”

“Call off your dog, I’m not here to fight.”

A scoff echoes faintly, and beneath that is an undercurrent of rage. It’s all I can do to keep from cracking the door open to take a look. I want to see her, and at the same time, I don’t. I’m terrified.

“Aria, let this one go,” the voice says softly. “This isn’t the time or the place.”

“Tch, fine.”

I hear Aria stomp away, and silence reigns for a few moments before…

“I will kill you, eventually.” A chill rolls down my spine at the deadly intent in those words. Is this really her? It can’t be, right? Right? It can’t be… Sunset?

Twilight laughs again, and I’ve heard enough derision in my time to be able to picture the condescending smirk on her face. For some reason, it both fits and doesn’t. That kind of look on Twilight, though? In my head, she almost becomes a different person.

The laugh, though, is nothing compared to the voice that comes next.

“You can certainly try.”

My stomach twists and I stumble back from the door. That… was Twilight? It couldn’t have been. That could not have been Twilight. No, moreover that voice could not have possibly even been human.

I bump into Sweetie’s bed and brace myself there, unwilling to approach the door again and risk hearing that voice again.

Human voices don’t chitter and echo like that. They don’t sound like a thousand centipede legs brushing together in just such a way that you can make out words.

There’s no suppressing the shiver that rolls through me.

Slowly, I turn and look down at Sweetie Belle, still pallid and breathing in weak, hollow swells. She truly does look dead.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

I clap a hand to my mouth, pinning in a scream, as I whip around to face Twilight, who’s standing in front of the door with her hands tucked into her pockets, and an oddly thin smile on her face.

“Is everything alright, Rarity?” Twilight’s face is doll-like—cold and unmoving—as she takes a step, then two, into the room.

Wrong. She’s wrong. Something about her is very, very wrong. “N-No… I…” I swallowed past a lump in my throat. “Everyth-thing is fine, daring,” I say shakily as I lower my hand.

Twilight’s eyes flick down to Sweetie Belle, and when they come back up to me there’s something dark lurking behind them. Something hungry.

“Don’t you want to know what that was about?” twilight asks casually as she walks over to me and stops at Sweetie’s bed, right beside me. “And who I was talking to?”

“I s-sure I don’t—“

Her doll-like smile stretches a touch wider, and my words die on my tongue.

There are a variety of things wrong with her and the absolute worst of it is that I really can’t put a finger on even one of them. Her expression, yes, but why? Her eyes? Her posture? The tilt of her lips? Yes, yes, and yes… but why? None of those things were there when I walked in on her standing beside Sweetie before, and that, I think is the worst part.

She was hiding them.

My heart lurches as she reaches out and brushes a strand of hair from Sweetie’s face, and I choke on air as I snap a hand out to slap hers away.

She catches my wrist before I can touch her, and my heart drops from my throat all the down to somewhere near my navel as goose flesh erupts across my arm.

What on earth is wrong with her hand?

It looks normal but it feels… cold. Cold and smooth and glassy, with enough give that it's undeniably organic but equally undeniably… not flesh. If anything, it feels almost like the shell of an insect.

Her fingers tighten around my hand, and I hate that I start to shake immediately.

“Sshhh, it’s okay?” Twilight hushes gently. “I’m not going to hurt you, I just want to ask you something.”

“Y-Yes?” I force myself to stay still even as the primal quarters of my brain are sounding raid sirens that I’m about to be eaten.

“Do you want her back?”

That question put a wicked shadow over my heart. What a question to ask… did I want my sister back? I hate that it takes me more than a moment to answer—I should have been able to say ‘yes’ without a second’s hesitation, but hesitate, I do.

At the very least, I take some solace in the fact that when I do answer, it’s with a shaky, but resolute nod.

“Do you know what’s wrong with her?” I ask weakly as Twilight lets go of my wrist.

“I do.” Twilight turns back to Sweetie and begins idly stroking her brow. “Memories are funny things. Physically, they’re just sparks between the synaptic gaps of the hypothalamus and, barring certain genetic neurological deviations, they’re not even all that reliable.”

She looks up at me then, and there is nothing remotely human in those black, black eyes with their pupils of molten gold.

“But what are we when they’re gone? Memories make us who we are. They bleed into us. Change us. They drive us, strengthen us, weaken us… and through us they can change the fabric of reality.”

I swallow thickly. “I… I don’t understand.”

Twilight shakes her head and laughs. “I know, but you will, my point is that your sister’s been emptied of her memories. It looks like fog, did you know that? Memories? They look like fog when they’re outside of us.”

“W-What?”

She lays her palm over Sweetie’s forehead carefully. “We all have it in us, memories laced with hope and despair… she had so much of the latter when I found her that it was killing her—eating away through her insides so much so that she was trying to dig it out of herself.”

My guts twist and lurch again. I want to throw up. In that instant I can see her again, standing with her back to me, digging and tearing, with blood dripping freely from open wounds into the sink as she mutilated herself.

“I took the Fog and made it something new,” Twilight continues. “But then they stole it… they took her despair away and left her empty. Just meat on a slab.”

“Magic… it’s magic,” I mumble, before turning to glare furiously at Twilight. “What did you do to her?”

Twilight’s lips curve into a vulpine smirk.

“I made her strong with what was already there, Rarity, so the better question might be—” she turns so fast I don’t even see her move, and grips my chin with those unsettlingly cold hands of hers “—what did you do to her?”

I open my mouth. Maybe to defend myself. Maybe to confess my sins. I don’t know. It all vanishes before I can catch any of it, and in the end I know it’s not necessary.

“Trick question,” Twilight says thinly. “I told you, I already molded her Fog… so I know what you did. I know everything you did—or rather, that you didn’t do.”

Tears trickle down my cheeks as the strength leaves my legs, and I sink slowly to my knees. My pajama bottoms are thin, and do nothing to keep my knees from scuffing on the cold tile, and a sob escapes my lips.

“I didn’t mean to.”

Her hand comes to rest on my head, brushing the messy tangle I’d left it in with gentle strokes.

“I know,” she says. “But it’s killing you isn’t it? The memories of those things you didn’t do?

“All the glanced-over bruises, and the little spots of blood on the bathroom sink that Sweetie missed when she was cleaning, and that you told yourself were from a nosebleed or a nicked finger? All the extra bandages in the cupboard, and the missing sewing needles? All the long-sleeved sweaters and hoodies that she never took off, even when it got too warm…”

Another sob rips out of me. It’s a wretched noise, but I don’t have the strength to care. My chest is burning and my stomach is roiling.

She’s right. Of course she’s right. I saw all of those things and I chose to ignore them. I chose to let her suffer because I was petty and ugly and sick inside and part of me hated her for her part in Sunset’s death. But it wasn’t just that. It was because in the process of killing Sunset, she’d shown me just how awful of a person I was capable of being, deep down.

“You can help me make it right, though.”

A hiccup catches in my throat as I look back up at Twilight with eyes that are burning with tears and exhaustion.

“H-How?”

Twilight kneels and presses her finger to my chest.

“There’s a light in you, a power, that’s orders of magnitude beyond powerful… and right now, that ache? It’s eating at the edges of that light like a corruption.” Twilight prods me on the chest again, a little harder.

“And you’ll f-fix it?” I ask hopefully.

Her laughter is such an ugly thing.

“No,” Twilight says flatly. “No, there’s no fixing it. You poisoned yourself, but I can take that pain and make you numb to it—make you stronger than it, see it’s not the hate that’s killing you, it’s the false hope.”

She splays her fingers and lays her palm over my heart, and for a moment that alien look on her face fades, and in its places there’s something like true sympathy.

“You still hope, even though you know it’s pointless, and that war inside you between despair and hope is the agony you feel,” Twilight says, in a gentle, and painfully human tone of voice. “Hope is the cancer that’s killing you, and if you let me, I’ll cut it out, and you’ll be free.”

I lay my hand over hers and this time I don’t flinch away from its unnatural texture. “Hope is the cancer…” I mumble, then let out a brittle laugh, “hope… hope is all I have left!”

Twilight sighs quietly and removes her hand only to cup my face gently. I shiver at the touch. You can’t really blame a girl. It’s… it’s been a little while since anyone’s held me like this.

“No, it’s not, because hope is a luxury and you can’t afford it,” Twilight says. “But pain? That’s free—and without hope killing you over it, pain and spite can animate you for a long, long time. Long enough to make hope redundant.” She traces her thumb over her cheek, and smiles. “Hope is just a wish, but if you let me darken that light we can turn that wish into a reality. It will hurt, and it will be a lot of hard work, but I can do it… we can do it, you, me, and Applejack.”

Applejack. My eyes snap open wide. “Y-You mean she—?”

Of course. They’ve been together for months, over a year actually. Over course Applejack knew. Of course she’d already said yes. What was I thinking?

Slowly, I lean into her touch. “It hurts so much, every day hurts. I spend every single day with my guts in knots… I can’t sleep… I c-can’t eat…”

“I know,” Twilight coos. “It’s because you’re sick.”

“H-Help me,” I sob.

“I will,” Twilight says, as she cards her fingers through my filthy, matted hair. “I’m just going to ask you a question, and all you have to do is say ‘yes’, okay?”

I nod frantically, and she smiles, and even though it’s strange and doll-like, and not even remotely human… it makes me smile too. Then she pulls me in, resting my fevered head against her shoulder, and she presses her cheek to mine and I shiver again as her lips brush my ear.

And she asks me the question.

“Will you be mine?”

“Y-Yes!”

Thunder claps above and around us as her arms go around me fully.

No… no not arms… something else, something cold and unpleasant like insect legs! My eyes snap open and the hospital is gone! All around me is darkness—illimitable darkness and Fog. God, but there’s something inside that darkness, though. Something shaped like a person but it’s not a person! It’s not! It’s not! Not a person! It’s legs and stingers and blowfly mandibles and twitching, spasming spinnerets all meshed together to look… like Twilight Sparkle.

And God. My God.

She’s smiling!

“Poor Rarity… I should have started with you, that was so much easier than Fluttershy,” she chittered.

I open my mouth to speak but I can’t. There’s no air. No words! I can’t breathe! And—what?!

“Ssshhh… it’s okay,” Twilight’s not-hand slithers across my face in the darkness, and settle on my abdomen. “You’ve got a corruption deep inside, and your hope is trying to fight it, but there’s no fighting despair. Despair is the perfectly logical reaction to the world as it is, and hope is just a mental sickness masquerading as a defensive mechanism, but I’m going to fix you just like—” I jerk and spasm as she digs her the stingers that are where her fingers should be into my flesh, and I can feel myself unspooling like a dropped roll of yarn “—that!”

When she grabs onto it, I feel it. It’s cold, like the first lick of ice cream on a hot day, or a wet rag on a brow slick with fever-sweats.

“Your corruption is powerful.” Twilight’s cicada susurration fills the air around my mind as darkness closes in. “It’s a sickness in your soul, and… oh… what’s this?” The smile in her voice grows wider. “How perfect… you’re absolutely perfect, Rarity, you’ll be able to weaken that two-bit anomaly, you’ll just have to be close enough to share your corruption, but that won’t be a problem will it?”

I feel her again, her lips like two centipedes pressed together as she comes close.

“After all, you’re just so generous.”

Another wrenching twist, and my world spirals, and the darkness recedes for a moment. Just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of the horror standing over me gripping a fistful of coruscating opal light. Her eyes are pools of darkness with sparks of gold like burning coins in the center, and her hair wavers with burning, impossible teal fire. From her back, wings like scorpion stingers and spider’s-legs stretch out, and the worst of it all is her chest.

A gaping, pulsating wound, hemorrhaging Fog like blood cleaves her almost in twain, from hip to shoulder, and I can see her twisting, shattered insides trying to hold her together.

Then she raises her free hand to her chest, and I realise for the first time that there’s something else there. Something around her neck. It’s like a pendant or an amulet… no, it’s too big. It’s more like a large purple locket, and unlike the rest of her grotesquely organic body, this thing is clearly made from metal, and by hand if I had to guess.

Twilight taps the center of the locket and a seam splits down the middle, and from inside, a pure golden-amber light flashes from within, and I get a glimpse of something—a crude, uncut gemstone, I think—and then the opal light is gone, swallowed by the amber light.

The locket snaps shut, and the light goes out, and all that’s left is the dark and the Fog.

“Now, time to finish you up.”

As she lays her hands on me, I realise, for the first time, that I’m not hurting. Nothing hurts. I don’t feel… anything. Just the lack of pain itself is almost like euphoria. It’s practically a religious experience. I don’t care that I’m swallowed by a hellish darkness surrounding a thing made of beetles and madness. All I care about is that it’s finally stopped hurting.

“Of course it has,” Twilight says, her voice a multi-toned, insectile whine. “I promise, didn’t I? And it’s going to get better… so much better… and when I’m finished, your corruption will be your strength, and when I’m done—?” I jerk in place as that unspooling feeling starts up again, and my whole body begins to unravel.

“You’re going to spread it like a Plague.”

Sunset

I tug at my collar and rub at my eyes as I lean my elbows on the table of the little Emergency Department break room. It’s the closest one to the Sleep Center, so I’m more than familiar with it, and even though I’m not on shift, none of the nurses have said a word.

The few that have been in anyway.

In the Canterlot ED nursing staff is a skeleton crew, and that skeleton is missing a few bones. It’s a tough job in a tougher city and takes a lot of gumption or a serious disregard for personal mental and physical health to do this job for any amount of time.

So I have a moment to breathe.

Ormond was only twenty four hours ago, if that, and I still feel like my body is about to fall apart. I slept for a few hours after Ghostface saw me home, but it wasn’t much. I couldn’t make myself go into the room that Tempest and I used to share—I didn’t have it in me.

I slept on the couch, which wasn’t what you’d call comfortable, but it was better than lying on that bed where everything still smells like her, and every single sight in the room reminds me of when she would hold me through the throes of my dreamwalking.

“Here.” Aria set down another styrofoam cup of crappy coffee in front of me before seating herself across from me, then more tersely: “I cannot believe the brass ones on that bitch.”

I shake my head. “She’s right… we can’t fight her here, not in the middle of all these people. It would be a bloodbath.”

“So what? We just let her walk around free?” Aria snaps.

The coffee is bitter and burnt, but I sip at it anyway. The caffeine helps a little and I need it. Everything hurts and it’s hard to concentrate. I need all the help I can get.

“No,” I reply after a moment. “She’s in a corner now, so to speak… plus, there has to be a reason she hasn’t gone all ‘eldritch horror’ on the whole of Canterlot, too…”

“That wound, you think?” Aria ventures.

Yeah, I do think that. When Ghostface and I confronted her in Ormond after Tempest’s ambush, I saw the brutal wound in her chest. Something had hurt her, and badly. Anything else would be dead about a dozen times over but she was holding herself together, but I’m willing to bet it isn’t by a wide enough margin that she’s willing to take risks.

She’s not the Entity. Not yet. If she takes enough damage from the right kind of weapon, I’d lay good odds that she’d come apart at the seams. Of course, saying that and doing it were two very different things.

“Hey.” Aria’s hand settles on mine, startling me out of my thoughts. Her eyes are so soft right now. Softer than they are for anyone but Redheart. “Talk to me, Red… don’t bury it, I know you’re hurting so please, talk to me.”

“I just don’t know how I missed it,” I say bitterly.

“We all missed it,” Aria says.

I scoff and shake my head. “Yeah, well, I was a little more up close and personal than everyone else—for fuck’s sake, Ari’ I was sleeping with her, and I somehow missed it!”

Aria grips my hand tight as she shakes her head.

“You know that’s not how it works! We can’t tell until they shift, you know that!” Aria takes my hand in both of hers and runs her thumb over my knuckles. “She was hiding it from everyone! You, me, the girls, everyone! And we let her do it because no one wanted to push anyone on what happened back in the Trials! That’s not your fault! You hear me?”

Her chair clatters as she stands and moves around to my side and kneels beside me. “Look at me, Red, okay? Look at me.”

I do, I turn to look at her, because I can’t tell Aria no. I don’t have it in me. She’s too important to me. I love her far too much. More than I ought to, considering she’s taken. Written’s Quill, there are a lot of days I wish I didn’t fall as easily as I do. It’s so easy for me, and it hurts so badly most of the time.

Especially with Aria.

Moreso with Tempest.

“What happened… and what she did? It wasn’t your fault, Red.” Aria stands and leans in to pull me against her. “She chose this, okay? Tempest chose to let go. She chose to stop fighting the despair that was eating at her and just… slip away. That isn’t on you, Red, you did the best you could all while you were fighting your own battles and half of everyone else's, okay? So please, please, don’t—”

Aria’s words dissolve in sobs without warning, and shock rolls through me as the strength goes out of her and she slowly slips to the floor. I let her, and I go with her. I lower myself with Aria and we cling to each other, and I can’t keep the tears in either as we just sob messily against each other’s shoulders.

“I can’t lose you too, Red,” Aria wails. “I can't, okay?! So please don’t go like she did! Please! I c-can’t lose you like that! I can’t do this w-without you, so p-please, if you’re… if you’re slipping, if those whispers get too loud, just talk to me!”

“You won’t lose me, Ari’, I promise,” I sob as she grips the collar of my shirt and buries her face in my hair.

“I love you so much, Red,” Aria cries. “You mean so much to me, okay? So please don’t make me watch my sister die!”

There’s nothing else in me to say, so I just nod and stroke her hair. There are times I forget that buried under all that steel resolve and fury is a surprisingly caring heart. Aria has a lot of love in her. It’s why she’s so angry most of the time. She’s angry at herself, and at the world, and at other people for always failing to do better. Love becomes anger so easily when there’s this much pain and injustice in the world.

But it’s still love, for all that.

Seeing Tempest twist herself inside out like that. Seeing her give up in Ormond? It shook something inside me. That, along with everything else.

Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and…

And Scootaloo.

Written’s Quill, poor Scootaloo. She deserved so much better than to die in the arms of a woman with knives for fingers while a ghost drove a knife into her heart. What an absolute fucking nightmare. Just remembering it makes me sick.

I push those thoughts away as I hold onto Aria, and we stay there on the floor of the brake room for a good while until Redheart walks in on us. The expression she gives is one of pain, and she’s a woman who shows pain so very seldom. We share a glance, and I nod, and Redheart settles in beside Aria, coaxing her girlfriend and lover into her arms as I stand and wipe at my face with the heels of my palms.

“I’m going to take a walk,” I say softly. “Is Rarity still…?”

Redheart grimaces. “I thought she went into Sweetie’s room, but she wasn't there when I checked. Considering what Aria confronted her about, I’m not too surprised.

“What about Twilight?”

“The bitch and her murderess are gone, too, thankfully.” Redheart looks genuinely relieved at that. I’m not surprised. The longer Twilight and Applejack were here, the more likely it was that tonight would end in blood.

Better for us all that they left.

“Take care of her,” I say as I turn away.

“I always do.”

She does. Far better than I would.

I move slowly through the hall down towards the rooms where Apple Bloom, Sweetie, and briefly consider going up to check on Fluttershy. I don’t, though. If I tried, Rainbow Dash would probably end me, and I don’t blame her. I made a call, and I still think it was the right one.

Without breaching the Thief—Twilight’s—hold on the Ormond Trial and shearing through her barrier, we would never have gotten everyone out.

If there had been another way, I would have taken it, but there wasn’t.

So instead, I reorient, and stop in front of Apple Bloom’s door.

I don’t know if I need to know what happened, in the strictest sense. Yeah, maybe there will be some information to glean about Twilight and company, but this isn’t really about that.

Taking a deep breath, I push the door open and step inside. The air is cool, and the EKG is chiming its faint and thready metronome as I walk over to Apple Bloom’s bed and settle in beside her.

“Hey Bloom,” I start. “Guess we both got ours, huh?” She’s silent, and that’s how she’ll stay. Whatever Ghostface took from her, it broke her. Maybe there isn’t enough human left in her to come back, but I can hope. “I… I wish I could ask for your permission, but let’s be real, that’s not going to happen, so I’m just going to have to say sorry in advance, because I… I need to know.”

I reach out and brush my hand over her cool forehead. At least her skin is cool now. No more fever-hot flush of the Legion Killer burning away under her skin like a sickness. Apple Bloom is now, for better or worse, just human.

“It’s selfish and I won’t deny it, but I want to know how it happened.” I raise my hand and concentrate.

It’s hard. Harder than it’s ever been before. It’s like forcing a migraine on myself to summon a vestige of the Nightmare into my hand until finally, a slender silver blade extrudes from my finger.

The tip of the Fog-forged blade presses to Apple Bloom’s forehead, and I sigh quietly. “Sorry, kiddo… but someone should remember, even if you don’t.”

I press my blade into her forehead and tap the well of her dreams. Ghostface may have taken her Fog from her, and the memories with them, but the ‘Cloud Save’ is still there. The Dreamtime remembers every nightmare. Every memory.

You just have to find the right door—I twist my fingerblade and feel myself connect—and the right key.

The dreams and memories flood my mind, and I see everything.

Author's Note

END OF ACT I - DARKNESS AMONG US

Act 1.0 - Darkness Among Us

Sirens flash blue and red light across the darkened Canterlot streets, staining everything with an odd, unnatural glow.

Other than the rumbling engines of the vehicles and the patter of light rainfall it is utterly silent. Over a dozen police officers, rookies, and CSI’s are in the area and each one of them is slumped over, snoozing away the evening.

I wander idly among the police cruisers and prone figures as I consider the position they’re in and feel a small pang of guilt. It’s not their fault that they’re here, and in point of fact, they’re really only doing their jobs.

Arguably this is where this small horde of Canterlot’s finest ought to be, given what’s down under the overpass of the River Canter’s south canal but, frankly, I can’t let them go down there yet for a pair of very good reasons.

Reason one: I can’t have them mucking up the scene before my own specialist arrives.

Reason two: if the perpetrator is still anywhere nearby then we’ll have a lot of dead cops on our hands.

I turn at the sound of rapidly approaching bare feet striking across the ground in a steady rhythm as their owner makes her way towards me.

A tall figure, female from the shape, emerges from the mist and rain. She towers over me, and her bare arms are corded with heavy working muscle. She wears a dirty babushka scarf over a thick, hand-woven linen blouse with a pale blue skirt that ends raggedly near her ankles of the same material. An old infantry belt is strapped around her waist and harnessed over her chest, and from it hangs half a dozen hatchets, each one polished and weighted for throwing.

Her hair is matted down from the rain, but its volume is mostly undeterred by the weight of the water, and a magnificent poof of orange hair emerges from what is probably the most noticeable of her features:

A blood-stained, chipped, and faded mask in the shape of a hare’s face.

“Another one?” Adagio asks in a raw, rasping voice as she strides into the middle of the officers, her eyes scanning around and passing over me as if I’m not there.

In fairness, to her, I’m technically not.

“Another one,” I confirm, my voice distorted into a thin, almost tinny warble. “Canterlot may be the murder capital of the nation, but this is getting unreasonable. The vic is down there.”

Adagio, the Huntress, raises her head in a curiously animalistic fashion and sniffs faintly at the air in the direction I gesture.

“Two,” she corrects grimly. “Two victims.”

I narrow my eyes. I don’t doubt her, I know better than that, no one can track like my Huntress and if she says there are two victims then there are two victims.

“Show me,” I say.

To my eyes, the world is filled with a lazy, pale mist. The police officers shine brightly in their slumber, their dreams drifting around them like mayflies. My fingers, five silver-bladed digits, twitch violently as I pass them… my instincts tell me to cut them, to slice them open and cover the ground in ruby splashes of blood.

I push those thoughts away, ignoring them as best I can. No matter what I do in this world, I can’t fully ignore what I am. Neither can Adagio when we’re wearing our ‘uniforms’. Neither of us can say we don’t feel those old urges and drives when we go out into the night to track down these seemingly random killings since they started happening nine months back.

The drive of one of the Entity’s priests.

His Killers.

Adagio takes long strides as she heads down to the canal of the River Canter and slips past the police tape. There are a pair of CSI’s slumped over near the wall that I’d almost missed when I was dragging all the officers on the scene into the Dream. I pass by them and the taped off cordon, and the smell of blood fills my nostrils. Somehow it’s more potent in the Dream, not less, and I can taste the coppery stink in the air.

“Here’s the first one,” I say, a little pointlessly as I walk up to the first body. “My guess is it’s the Legion's work.”

There are too many dead in Canterlot lately. There’s always been chaos in this city, far more than I ever realised until lately, but this past year has been unspeakable. Three recognised serial killers are on the loose, all with different modus operandi, and twenty-eight kills between them; The Legion, named for a series of graffiti marking their kills, The Narc after their targets in the drug scene, and the Ogre of the East, named for their brutal killing style.

At least one of them has to be a Killer, I’m certain of it, but we’ve never found any solid evidence since we started looking into it eight months ago.

“Thin, deep wounds,” Adagio says softly, nudging the body of what was once a young woman to and fro with the head of her hatchet to prevent contamination of the scene. “Just like the Legion’s other… no… not like the others…”

“What do you mean?” I ask, furrowing my brow as I move closer to her. “The wounds look identical.”

“They are, but that isn’t what I’m talking about,” Adagio says, her voice is tight and angry. “It’s not the type of wounds… it’s where they are.”

I kneel next to her, invisible in the Dream, and look over the body.

“Written’s Quill…” I mutter softly.

“You see it?” Adagio asks, glancing to her side where she knows I am. “They’re getting more accurate. All of these strikes hit major arteries or veins. She would’ve bled out in moments if she hadn't been murdered outright.”

I click my tongue and stand up, staring around the canal pit looking for what I knew I would find.

“Here,” I say softly, moving past Adagio towards the darkest corner. “I found it.”

Adagio stood and walked over to me, and I can hear her humming softly in the back of her throat. It’s compulsive, and she mostly keeps it under control, but when she’s riled up she always starts humming again.

Reaching out past me, Adagio takes hold of the bitterly cold metal and draws it into the light.

A butcher’s hook hangs incongruously from the ceiling of the overpass by a rusted but deceptively strong chain.

“Just the one?” Adagio asks.

“Yeah, just one,” I confirm. “Whoever jacked up the Entity still doesn’t know how to create a true Trial Ground on the fly, so they’re jury-rigging it.”

“This one feels more real than the others,” Adagio remarks grimly, giving the hook a sharp tug. “Sturdier too.”

“Wasteful is what it is,” I say derisively. “Conjuring a Sacrificial Hook out of Realspace is about as brute force as it gets.”

Shaking her head, Adagio starts towards me. “They’re getting better, Sunset, you know that. No one heard the girl scream, and last reports from when she called emergency services put her almost two miles from here,” Turning, Adagio looks over at the body. “So how did she get all the way to the canal?”

My lips press to a thin, hard line. “The Fog.”

“Distance is variable in the Fog,” Adagio confirms. “It’s never quite right… and we knew at least one of the murderers had to be a Fogborn Killer, so that confirms this one at least.”

“Two,” I say after a few moments. “You said there were two victims.”

Adagio nods and moves a little further into the overpass tunnel until she reaches a pile of refuse. As I close alongside her the smell of blood gets stronger, and I feel a familiar, brutal burn in my chest.

The urge to draw a waking mind into my Nightmare.

“Here,” Adagio whispers, “I can smell him.”

“Quill, Adagio, that’s not another victim,” I hiss, “get that shit off him he’s still alive!”

I hear a sharp intake of breath from Adagio and she dives forward, pulling the scraps of garbage and cloth from the pile to reveal a badly bleeding figure. He's filthy, and it's hard to tell there's even a person at all under the blood-soaked layers of clothing he's wearing: ratty fingerless gloves, a stinking jacket covered by an oversized windbreaker, and he smells like trash and cheap cigarettes.

Just one of Canterlot’s thousands of homeless and destitute that I had been among, once upon a time.

“You poor bastard,” I say softly, stepping past Adagio. “He’s on his way out, isn’t he?”

Adagio gave a short nod. “If we could get him to Aria quickly maybe, but… no, I don’t think he’ll last.”

I close my eyes and sigh. Just one more person I wasn’t able to save.

“He can still help us, though,” I slip between him and Adagio, and I kneel, reaching out a single, invisible, bladed finger to his forehead. “I can at least give him some peace while I’m at it.”

sLeEp.

A bubble of laughter escapes my lips as I pull him into my Dream, a reflexive reaction to the welling euphoria of exercising my power. He lets out a sharp gasp as his brain reels from the shift, and then he relaxes, the pain of the waking world becoming a distant thing.

“Show me what you saw, old man,” I mutter as I brace a single blade against his forehead and press hard. “I can’t save you but maybe…”

The old man jerks as I submerge into his recent memories and pull at them like stray fiber strands of an unraveling sweater.

“Show me.”

My body hurts. Everything hurts, and my throat burns with sickness. I’ve been sick for so long though that I hardly notice it, nor do I necessarily notice the feverish chill.

It’s surprising what a body can get used to.

It’s cold and the rain is coming down hard, but I have a place I know under the canal that stays dry.

I push my cart of belongings; Blankets that are stained with sweat and the refuse of Canterlot’s alleys and bends, cans I can exchange for enough change to feed myself if I’m fortunate, and a few other more sentimental trinkets.

A picture of my daughter, eight years dead.

My father's cufflinks I might sell one day if I’m ever that desperate.

And—

“Help!”

A voice shrieks, young and terrified, and I look up to see a wall of fog rolling in across the river and out of the overpass tunnel.

“Please, somebody!” The voice shrieks again. “Help!”

She bursts out of the fog, ragged and harrowed, her body covered in deep cuts with blood staining much of her jogging outfit. Her pale blue skin and red hair are streaked with sweat as she staggers into the tunnel.

Then I hear it.

Heavy panting and the hammering of footfalls behind her.

I don’t know why I move. Maybe because she reminds me so much of my daughter.

I knock my cart over as I stumble past the girl just as the figure bolts from the fog. They’re wearing stained grey-green denim jeans and a faded dark blue denim jacket over a hoodie, with the hood pulled over their head.

The mask is what freezes me though. Pale and filthy white, the whole top of it is stained with red, and the eyes are just two circles with notched crudely down their centers. The mouth is nothing is a broad, finger-daubed and toothy rictus grin.

Panting, raw and ragged, pours from their mouth as they shoulder me out of the way. They’re slight and neither heavy nor tall, but they are so strong.

Drugs maybe, I imagine, as they hit me like a freight train, and I feel something puncture my stomach then tear free, leaving behind a cold, blinding pain.

I collapse to the ground, moaning as I see them barrel past me to bring the girl down.

They leap upon the girl like an animal; a predator. I see the girl try to defend herself, raising a hand, only for the blade to pierce through her palm, spraying her face with her own blood. She screams as the masked figure rips the knife out, and she tries to drag herself away only for the figure, the thing, to seize her by the ankle and drag her backwards, stabbing her repeatedly in the back only to flip her over, slam the knife into her chest and drag it ruthlessly down, gutting her.

Then they turned to face me, panting and bloodstained, their footsteps are shaky and frenetic. I grip my stomach as they approach, they raise the knife, then…

They stagger backward and release a high, ululating howl, gripping their masked face as they lurch violently.

“You were supposed to hang them from the hook, dumbass,” a cracked, raw voice says from the darkness, and another figure, masked like the first one with simple, hollowed-out circle-dots for eyes, and the mouth is another wide and hand-drawn smile of insanity. “Boss is gonna get pissed off again.”

The figure lets out another bloodthirsty, guttural shriek.

“The time limit is almost up, we need to get back,” a third voice says insistently, it's speaker unseen, and suddenly the fog sweeps in like a tidal wave.

And then there's nothing but a brutalized corpse and my own dying breaths.

I jerk back, staggered and shocked.

“We were right,” I mutter grimly, and Adagio frowns. “Hundred percent. Whoever stole the Entity’s mojo figured out his hat trick… they’re making new Killers.”

Adagio curses viciously.

“Now what?”

“Now we get outta here,” I say with an angry sigh. “These cops are going to have enough questions as it is once they all wake up and I don’t want their first one to be ‘hey who’s the giant lady in the bunny mask!?’, okay?”

Adagio scoffs but I hear the faint laughter behind it. She gives me a short nod and turns on her heel to begin moving away. She moves with swift, sure footsteps and in moments the faint but natural fog of the early Canterlot morning swallows her form. I wait for a few moments, staring down at the pair of corpses while I feel my grip on the slumbering minds of the surrounding cops and sundry fade. They won’t see me even if they do wake up while I’m still here, and it doesn’t take me nearly as long to get back to a safe haven.

Three Killers, though. So it's what we suspected. That the Legion isn’t one person quoting scripture for the dramatic effect, it’s actually a group, and they’re definitely Fogborn, but there’s something wrong with them. They’re half-formed. Half-made.

More importantly, they’re still lucid.

Maybe they’re like me, not fully human or Killer, but something in between. It would explain a lot, and it would be understandable… the thief who stole the Old Stain’s powers clearly didn’t know how they worked, at least not entirely, and that’s in our favor for now.

For now.

It’s been a year, though. A full year since I escaped from the nullspace void between dimensions, and two years since the girls escaped from my Trial Ground. The thief has had a year to practice with their powers, and this is the culmination of that practice.

Newborn Killers.

“Whatever,” I look around at the sprawled cops and sigh. “Time to go home…”

I close my eyes, reach out, and I—

Author's Note

And here we go. Took me a couple of years to decide to do it, but we're on the road to hell now everyone. Thanks for waiting and I hope you enjoy, and if you want to support me officially, please consider visiting my Patreon!

1.22

“Sunset?”

A warm hand settles on my arm and shakes me gently, and I take a half-hearted swat at it as I roll over under the covers. The sun is streaming in from the windows, and it’s warming me up enough that I have no desire whatsoever to excavate my lazy ass from the fortress of comfort I’ve nestled into over the cold night. Maybe it’s early, maybe it’s late, what I do know is that I’m not done sleeping.

“Sunset, come on, you have work in a couple of hours and you need to eat something.”

I take a deep breath, and the scent of storm rain fills my nostrils, along with something undefinably floral.

“Mmm… no.”

A soft huff comes from beside me that turns into a gentle chuckle. I know that voice. Don’t I? I should. Every bone in my body tells me that I know that voice and that its owner is achingly dear to me, but I don’t know why.

Why? Why don’t I know?

I frown into my pillows, then shift and turn in bed as I push myself up on my elbows and shake my head. Something is wrong. My mind is foggy.

A hand settles on over mine and traces across my fingers. Pale, amber fingers. Not silver. Right? Why would they be silver? Who has silver fingers? The hand is a delicate shade of green, and I follow the hand up to its owner.

“Good morning,” Wallflower says quietly.

I rub at my eyes and look around. Our apartment is just how I remember it. Or at least I think so. The bed is situated in a raised loft, and the apartment below is small but cozy, with a den and kitchenette adjoining one another. We’ve been living here for… how long?

A while, I think.

Wallflower is wearing a sweater to ward off the perpetual cold of Canterlot that seeps into most apartments where the heating isn’t good, and the heating isn’t great in this place. I shiver. It smells like snow… snow, and woodsmoke.

“Did I fall asleep?” I ask groggily.

“For a little while.”

I furrow my brow as I look up at her. At her soft, oak-brown eyes, and those chaotic little curls of morning-glory green hair. There’s something about her that feels so nostalgic that it hurts. Something in the tilt of her smile, and how it dimples her cheeks, making the scatter of pretty freckles more prominent.

Wallflower cards her fingers through my hair and I shudder at the way her touch feels against my skin; cool and careful, like she’s afraid of hurting me. How long has it been since someone’s been worried about hurting me? How long since anyone has been gentle?

A sob wracks my chest as I curl up on the bed, pain shooting through my limbs as the noise escapes with tears on its heels, and I put my back to the beautiful girl beside me. Wallflower’s hand settles on my shoulder and I can feel the worry in the tension of her palm.

“Sunset?!”

“S’not real,” I sob. “It’s not… none of this is real.”

Wallflower relaxes her grip slowly, but she doesn’t let go.

“It could be,” she says quietly. “What are dreams but the reality we want most?”

A bitter laugh bubbles out of me like tar up from an open pit, and it burns in my throat like bile as I curl in on myself. Dreams? Reality? No, I don’t have any more dreams left.

“I don’t get to have dreams after the things I’ve done,” I hiss, still staring away from her, away from the source of that painfully nostalgic voice. “I’m a monster, and all monsters have left are nightmares.”

This isn’t real. It’s just a dream. It has to be. I don’t know how I got here or when or why, but it’s not real. I remember cold snow and smoke. I remember Ormond. I remember blood and thunder and screams. I remember…

Warmth presses against my back as Wallflower lies down beside me, wraps her arms around my middle, and hugs me close.

“Even monsters dream of sunshine sometimes,” she whispers.

“No…” I mumble around a mouthful of sobs and salty tears. It takes a titanic force of will not to lay my hands over hers where they’re resting on my abdomen.

She hugs me all the tighter, undeterred by my refusal.

“Stay here,” she whispers. “Stay with m—”

The rest of her voice cuts off like a faulty recording, and the world around me shudders violently. The small apartment shakes and heaves, and pain spikes through my gut, choking my breath out of my lungs and filling my veins with ice.

I look down at myself, and at the slowly spreading pool of red spilling out from me to stain my shirt and the mattress.

I’m bleeding.

I’ve been… stabbed? Is that what happened?

What’s going on?

Something jerks painfully in my gut, and I double over with a pitiful moan, hacking and coughing as someone twists an invisible knife. I’m bleeding. I’m dying. I’m going to—

Black, ichorous blood spills from between my sharp teeth and thin, chapped lips as I spasm back to consciousness. A powerful grip anchors me to the ground, pinning me to the floor as I jerk like a stuck pig, make soundless wheezes as I try to drag breath into my abused lungs.

“Stay still,” a familiar, crackling voice says.

My vision resolves on a shadowed figure looming over me with a face like a screaming ghost. One hand is gripping my shoulder and keeping me in place, while the other… I look down in time to see them pulling the tip of their knife from my gut. It couldn’t have been more than a knick, but I feel like I just got run through with a fire poker.

“W-What happened?” I gasp out as I look around.

And I take in the devastation of Ormond.

Whole sections of the Lodge are ripped free of the bonds of gravity, floating here and there with Fog wrapping around them like chains. My friends; Aria, Sour, Starlight, and Adagio… they’re all lying unconscious, sprawled out with dull, glassy expressions, and the barest effort of my power tells me they’re all locked in their own separate dream. There’s no sign of the Legion, but where they had been is a collapsed section of the Lodge.

Hopefully, they’re under there somewhere.

“Your power went haywire,” Ghostface says pointedly as they stand and extend a hand. I accept the proffered limb and let them pull me up—

—just in time for stars to explode across my vision as something heavy cracks across my face and sends me back onto the cold, filthy concrete.

“You bitch!” Rainbow Dash’s face is contorted with rage. “What the fuck did you do?!”

I spit a single, shark-like tooth out as I rub my jaw and sit up. Cradled in one of Rainbow’s arms is the grievously wounded Fluttershy, clinging to life only by dint of her newly-enhanced Survivor biology. Rainbow’s other hand has her cane in a white-knuckled grip as she advances on me with murder in her eyes.

“Enough.”

There’s no movement, just the sound of fabric shifting and an impression of shadows, and suddenly Ghostface is between us with their knife pressed to Rainbow’s jugular, the tip barely depressing her skin.

Rainbow’s eyes are lambent with gold fury, and she’s breathing hard as I stand, taking advantage of Ghostface’s intervention.

Instantly, my vision swims, and I stumble as I try to get to grips with my own head.

“I… I did what I had to,” I slur as I try to focus, but my vision keeps doubling over on itself. “I saved as much of her as I could.”

“If she dies,” Rainbow snarls, “I’m going to kill you.”

I scoff as I plant my feet and try not to revisit my last two meals. “Once all this is done with, you’re welcome to give it your best shot.”

“Go,” Ghostface says, “get her out of here.”

Rainbow’s left eye develops an alarming twitch, but she nods. Before she can get out, though, I put out a hand.

“Wait!” I say, then point to my huddled friends. “Take Aria with you!”

“Why should I?!” Rainbow snaps.

“Because, dumbass,” I retort, “she’s the best ED trauma surgeon in Canterlot, grab her and get to Canterlot General, now!”

To Rainbow’s credit, she looks a little abashed as she pulls away from Ghostface’s blade and runs to Aria’s side. I reach out and into Aria’s sleeping mind at the same time, and I pull the ripcord on her consciousness. Aria jerks awake, blinking away what I swear are tears for a brief moment before her gaze sharpens as she gets back to the present.

“C’mon, Doc, we’re outta here,” Rainbow says before Aria can protest, scooping her up with her other arm.

Aria squawks in alarm as she’s thrown bodily over Rainbow’s shoulder, and she kicks and thrashes.

“Let her take you!” I snap, and Aria zeroes in on me as Rainbow adjusts her grip. “We’ll be right behind you, Ari’, I promise.”

Aria opens and closes her mouth twice before finally biting her lip, nodding, and relaxing into Rainbow’s grasp.

“You’d better be, Red,” she says, as Rainbow settles her heels against the concrete in a sprinter’s start, drags in a ragged breath, then shifts and twists.

Rainbow’s body bulges and malforms grotesquely, the muscles in her arms and legs warping as the inborn serums of the Entity course through her veins, mutating her already powerful body into the form of a true, Fogborn Killer.

The Blight lets out a ragged shriek and pushes off, moving faster even than the Legion, albeit with far less control and grace. The Legion has something of the predator to them, while Blight is more like an out-of-control mack truck barrelling down the highway going eighty.

“Well, that’s two,” I say as I walk leadenly to my other friends.

Even Adagio is slumped over in repose, her Killer’s mind wrapped in the squall of the dreamstorm I unleashed when I blew through the Thief’s tethers on this Trial.

“What did you do to this place?” Ghostface asks as I move past them. “You broke whatever was keeping us out, but this is…”

I chuckle quietly as, all around us, Ormond heaves and shifts, with whole sections of the Lodge ripping torturously free from the earth only to sink back and rebind to it moments later. The snow falls only to reverse course back to the heavens, and above us, the sky roils with chaotic black clouds as Fog bleeds from the air itself.

Shooting Ghostface my best Discord-may-care smirk, I flourish my bladed fingers towards the chaos above us. “I took the holiest power in the known multiverse and used it to give the Thief the mother of all right hooks… now my turn, what did you do to me?”

I look pointedly at the knife in Ghostface’s hand, they follow the line of my gaze and raise the weapon, spinning it deftly on their palm before flipping it across the back of their hand and flicking it back into the sheathe hidden somewhere in the volume of their layered black clothing.

“You were saturated in your own power,” Ghostface explains with a shrug. “So, I used the Lesser Knife to bleed some of it out, that’s all.”

I reach into the minds of my three friends, pulling them from the precipice of the Dreamtime and back to the Real as I consider Ghostface’s words. Sour Sweet is the first to wake, looking sullen as she sits up and rubs at her face, Starlight follows a moment later, with Adagio stirring fitfully before finally pushing herself up from the concrete.

“Why’s it called the Lesser Knife if it can do something like that?” I ask, raising an eyebrow at them.

Ghostface’s blank expression betrays nothing for the moment it takes them to answer, and when they do it’s cryptic.

“Because it’s a reflection… a shadow of a greater knife.” Ghostface’s tone tells me that’s the end of that conversation.

Well, I’ll let it be the end for now. I’m not quite done, but this is neither the time nor the place.

“You two okay?” I ask as Sour stumbles over to her girlfriend and drops down beside Starlight, pulling her into her arms and burying her face in Starlight’s hair.

“Y-Yeah,” Starlight mumbles as she pats Sour’s shoulder. “Thanks for the save, Sunset.”

“Anything for you girls,” I say softly before turning back to Adagio.

Frankly speaking, she looks like shit. Her face is pallid and drawn beneath the half-mask, and the darkness of her Huntress’s eyes are clouded with flashes of berry red like she’s flickering between her two sides. That’s not good.

“You with me, ‘Dagi?” I ask cautiously.

“More or less,” she rasps. “If you’re taking requests, by the by… I’d appreciate it if you never do that again.”

“I’ll take your request under consideration,” I say with a faint smirk that falls away a moment later as Adagio sags. “Seriously, though… are you okay?”

She shakes her head wordlessly. I’m not surprised, but it’s still a kick in the shins. I never wanted to hurt my friends or family, and I knew what I was doing was a gamble; wielding pure hope like that isn’t something a being like me was ever meant to be able to do. That’s the purview of my maker. Sure, I stole a few sips of hope to power a couple of spells back in the Trials, but comparing this to that is like comparing drowning in a flash flood to taking a drink of water. There was bound to be some blowback and, per usual, the people I care about most got caught in it.

“Can you get Sour and Starlight out of the Trial?" I ask.

“Will the Thief let us?” Adagio asks, fixing me with a look that’s disturbingly disjointed. One of her eyes is the pure black of her Huntress aspect, while the other is the bright shadow of raspberry I recognise as my sister’s eye.

I ignore it. No time to dwell on that for now.

“They don’t get a say,” I reply, then gesture around us. “This is no-man’s land now, the Thief can’t control it anymore, that’s why Ghosty here—” I jerk a thumb back at Ghostface “—can get inside now. The downside is, I can’t control it either.”

“Someone is keeping it together,” Adagio says, nodding at a bit of wall that just tore off and which is now pulling back into place.

My smirk fades as the pile of rubble behind us shifts, then shudders, then rocks violently as half a ton of lumber and concrete lift weightlessly into the air. Parts of them dissolve into pure Fog which starts to disperse as three figures stand shakily from under the shadow of the ruined material.

The Fog sieves into the three fledgling Killers, and their presence swells with untapped power. I can almost feel their frenzy and need for violence from here.

Damn it all. I fucked up.

None of them should be strong enough to seize control of their Trial yet! They’re not even finished! Despite that, the Legion is holding the Ormond Trial together by sheer force of will.

And that’s when it hits me.

They’re a gestalt consciousness.

It didn’t default to one of them like it would with a normal Killer. Like it had with me when I severed the Old Stain’s anchors that served as its conduit to controlling my Trial. It defaulted to all three of them. They’re holding this frozen hell together by balancing it between their three minds, rebuilding pieces of the Trial as it falls apart by sharing the workload.

“Adagio, take Sour and Starlight and run,” I say quietly.

A shudder runs collectively through the Legion like a ripple across a lake. In a moment they’ll have shrugged off the last of my dreamstorm, and then we’ll really be in the shit.

“Sunset I’m not—” Adagio starts, but I cut her off.

“We both knew this might happen!” I snarl, shooting a venomous glare at her. “We knew this might be a sacrifice play! Survivors can’t navigate the Fog if it’s controlled by a Killer, so you need to take them and go!”

“Bullshit!” Sour Sweet snarls, but I cut her off with a glare before she can get going on a tirade.

Beside her, Adagio grits her teeth hard enough that I hear her jaw creak as she turns to look at the Legion who are jerking spasmodically as they hammer their way through my curse. Just being this close to them is like taking a deep breath of a toxic miasma. It feels like if we make a single move forward we’ll set them off.

“You had better survive,” Adagio snaps.

“Come back to us, Sunset,” Starlight says quietly. “Please.”

I try to give her a confident smirk over my shoulder, but it’s not in me. I can feel this whole marble of reality jerking and snapping as the Legion yokes it to their will.

“Sorry, Star,” I say, finally. “No promises.”

Adagio moves in, lunging forward to scoop both Sour and Starlight into her arms, the former going with the opposite of grace as she kicks and spits like an angry cat as Adagio drags them out of Ormond. Sour Sweet, always belligerent, always the first to jump to any of our defenses the moment someone looks at us crosswise. Starlight Glimmer, sharp, incisive; a prodigy that rivals me at my brightest if only she’d let herself believe it.

“You should go, too,” I say as I turn to face the Legion, claws out.

Ghostface moves to my side and palms their blade, the so-called ‘Lesser Knife’, and shakes their head.

I turn my head enough to get a good look at them, and not for the first time I wish they weren’t wearing that mask. It’s so hard to tell what they’re thinking, and I hate not being able to read people.

“You’ll die if I do,” Ghostface says in that toneless, modulated crackle.

“And?” I ask with a huffing laugh. “Who cares?”

At that, Ghostface makes a strange sound, almost like a sigh, and some tiny part of my mind wants to say it sounds familiar.

“I do,” Ghostface says finally.

The Legion has stopped twitching and are now standing in eerie silence, and I can feel how their bodies and minds have linked up fully now. Drenched in the Fog as they are, with full control of their Trial in their hands; if they aren’t fully-fledged Killers yet, they’re damn close.

Close enough as makes no difference.

“Why?” I ask quietly.

Ghostface doesn’t answer immediately. Instead, they run a finger across the flat of the Lesser Knife’s blade, and an odd flicker of green magic sparks across their gloved fingertip.

“I don’t know,” they say so softly that it barely comes out through the voice modulator.

“Well, time’s up anyhow,” I say, clashing my fingers as the Legion straightens with that unsettling synchronicity, “If we go down, tell the Old Stain I said ‘hello’.”

Ghostface flicks their knife over their hand in a stunning display of manual dexterity, and when they speak—even with their voice distorted by a modulator and their face hidden by a mask—I swear they’re smirking.

“Tell him yourself.”

I snort as the Legion steadies themselves and fixes their trifold gaze on the pair of us, and I swallow thickly as the cold wash of adrenaline rolls through me. I don’t know how much of Apple Bloom, Scootaloo, and Sweetie Belle is really left in those three, but now…

“If we get out of this remind me to buy you a drink,” I say with a laugh.

“I don’t drink.”

“Dinner and a movie?”

Ghostface turns slowly to regard me with something very much like disbelief and I give them a shameless grin along with a waggle of my eyebrows.

“Guess you’ll flirt with everything,” they mutter.

I shrug. “Only if they’re cute or dangerous.”

Any other banter left to us is drowned out by three shrieks of rage as Legion bolts forward. Bloom, with her hunting knife, takes the lead, pulling ahead of her little pack while Sweetie and Scootaloo peel off on either side, circling us like starving wolves. Apple Bloom lunges, her blade flashing in the thin light of the Fog-stained ruin of Ormond.

For a moment, time slows, and I know it’s just the adrenaline. It’s been so long since I’ve been in a fight like this. Since I’ve bet it all on a single roll of the dice. The difference here is that last time, I did it alone. Everyone else; Adagio, Sonata, Starlight, Tempest, and Sour Sweet, even Rainbow and the brats… they were all pieces on the chessboard—cards in my hand that I was using to bluff the Old Stain into going all in.

Ghostface isn’t a piece or a card.

I have no control over them and honestly? It’s kind of refreshing.

They cut in front of me, moving like a metal shadow, flicking their blade out to catch and spoil Apple Bloom’s slash, turning the strike down and to the side. Bloom lets out a snarl of rage that’s cut off with the sound of snapping cartilage as Ghostface drives their knee hard up into the fledgling Killer’s diaphragm.

Behind them, Scootaloo and Sweetie wheel about, snapping their own makeshift weapons out as they try to circle and bolt in to take Ghostface in the back while Apple Bloom keeps their attention.

“Not likely!”

I spin around and press my back to Ghostface, weaving snapping jaws of Fog-forged silver with my claws, taking shallow cuts on my arms that refuse to seal up properly, but avoiding anything like a solid blow, and keeping them off Ghostface so I can let them deal with the Legion’s main conduit.

A strained grunt from Ghostface is my only warning, but it’s enough, and I brace myself as Apple Bloom leverages her enhanced strength to force Ghostface backward.

My ally collides hard with my back and I widen my stance, taking the force of the hit as I spit “up and over!” and drop down, bending at the waist and twisting, letting Ghostface roll over my back with the liquid motion of a practiced movement. Dragging my silver claws across the filthy concrete, we switch places. Ghostface swings over me boots first, landing two heels hard in Scootaloo’s chest, center mass, and sending her flying back as I face Apple Bloom with a hard upward slash.

Legion tries to catch my attack but the angle is bad, and they’re still wrong-footed from losing their first target. Bloom lets out a feral bark as she takes the force of my claws across the length of her knife, but without time to plant her feet the force of my blow picks her up, bodily heaving her off of her feet and into the air.

“Welcome back to school!” I snarl as I expend a few drops of precious magic, flickering myself straight up in front of the Legion.

Staggered and rattled, it’s all Apple Bloom can do to bring her arms up and take five claws to the meat of her forearms. Blood splashes across the floor, turning the dirty snow and concrete crimson as I hammer Bloom to the ground.

She bounces like a dodgeball full of meat, with a wet smack, and I land as Ghostface is advancing on Sweetie Belle, slashing their blade in short, sharp strokes in front of the frenetic Killer’s face before snapping the blade back, twisting their body and landing the heel of their boot against Sweetie’s skull in a spinning heel kick, sending her almost flying, punch-drunk and reeling, backward to impact the far wall bonelessly.

“In front!” Ghostface snaps as they charge Sweetie, who’s scrambling to get to her feet.

I don’t know why, but I don’t hesitate. It’s never been like this before. Not with Aria, or Adagio, or anyone. It’s like Ghostface is in my head and I’m in theirs, and while normally that would bother me, with them it feels… natural.

So I don’t think. I just surge forward on Ghostface’s heels, paying out a little more of my dwindling reserves to flicker in front of them and drop to a skid on my knees just as Sweetie gets her feet under her and pulls her metal stake up and out.

I slash wide, not aiming for her but her weapon, and hiss when the needles and ragged edges cut the palm of my hand as I knock the ruler-stake wide just as I feel boots hit my back, then my shoulders. Ghostface mantles over me, shining knife raised high above their head with the point down in a vertical stab.

Their shadow falls over Sweetie Belle who looks up in mute shock for a moment—just a moment—just long enough for Ghostface to hit Sweetie hard, bearing her to the ground and driving the Lesser Knife hard into the center-point where all three pieces of her cracked mask meet, hammering through mask, meat, and bone, with a wooden thunk and nailing Sweetie to the ground.

Apple Bloom screams from across the room, her voice a shredded, ragged howl of hatred.

“Your memories are mine,” Ghostface hisses, and then pulls the blade out with visible effort, straining as they wrench the blade out.

Along with the unearthly metal come sparks and crackles of green light interspersed with concentrated streams of Fog as Ghostface drags the blade from Sweetie’s skull. It comes free with a snap of pressure and a dolorous peal of thunder, and the moment the last sliver of the blade is out, Sweetie spasms violently, every muscle in her body going rigid and tense, and a strangled cry comes keening straight from the depths of the half-breed Killer’s soul as a pillar of Fog and green lightning briefly arcs out of the puncture in her mask, striking Ghostface’s blade which they hold raised above their head in a conquerer’s fist.

“NO!”

Apple Bloom and Scootaloo charge us from opposite sides of the Lodge, weapons out and flashing in front of them as they barrel forward. In front of me, Apple Bloom closes the distance faster than I process, and it’s all I can do to fend off her feral frenzy of slashes. My back collides with Ghostface’s and we hold each other up as they weave a net of practiced knifework, keeping Scootaloo at bay while Apple Bloom cuts notches in my fingers.

“AH’M GONNA KILL YA!” Bloom shrieks.

“Get in line!”

I plant a heel straight back, past Ghostface’s legs, and let Apple Bloom knock one of my hands wide. I let her commit, and then overcommit, as I twist bodily against Ghostface’s back, looping my flailing arm around their torso, and slipping my leg between theirs.

“Cha~nge places!” I bellow, cackling gleefully as I wrench Ghostface tight against my back.

They go slack, letting me control them before tensing as I twist around in a full hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, avoiding the killing thrust of Apple Bloom’s knife, and delivering Ghostface straight at her from her blind side.

I hear the Lesser Knife land hard but I don’t get to see it as I let go and leg it forward at Scootaloo who scores a brutal cut across my face, drawing a straight, ragged line from my left cheek, over my nose, and out across my right cheek, narrowly missing ripping my eyes out as I lunge forward and drive my fingerblades hard into Scootaloo’s chest, staggering her back.

“Let’s try this dance again!” I hiss, and she jerks violently as I rip her waking mind into my dream world.

It’s harder this time but it staggers her and sends her reeling backward, clutching her head and screaming. Rather than follow through, I twist around, to face Apple Bloom.

“Hold her down!” Ghostface snarls.

They’ve got Apple Bloom, pinned, pissed, and thrashing beneath them, but barely, and with the Lesser Knife driven deep into Bloom’s shoulder, nailing her to the ground. I don’t question why they need the help, I just move, swapping places with Ghostface and sweeping my blades around to dig them deep into Apple Bloom’s flesh.

She convulses as I pour myself into her mind, digging claws and teeth into her fears and terrors and dragging her into the depths of my power as Ghostface rips their blade out.

“Hold her still,” Ghostface says as they stare straight down at Legion for a moment, holding stock still as they do.

“Uh, couldja hurry it up?” I say as I shoot a glance over my shoulder at Scootaloo who’s torn half a stone pillar to shreds in a manic fit of violence, but is clearly getting her faculties back.

Ghostface lets out a soft huff, almost like a laugh, and says: “found you.”

They reach past Apple Bloom’s hood and grip her by her scalp, wrench her head back, and ram their knife into the soft spot between the throat and the sternum.

“Give me everything!” Ghostface hisses.

Fog and emerald lightning arc out Apple Bloom as Ghostface digs the knife deep, twists it like they’re turning the tumblers in a padlock, then rips the blade free with a grunt of effort, dragging Fog, light, and emerald lightning from Apple Bloom on a peal of thunder that rocks the skies above us.

The fight goes out of Apple Bloom, and she goes slack in my arms a moment later. I lower her carefully to the ground. I don’t know what Ghostface did, and I’m not sure I like it, but I can feel Bloom’s heartbeat, thready but present in her chest, and despite what Ghostface did to Sweetie I can feel the faint flickers of her living mind present too.

They’re both alive and, frankly, that’s better than I’d hoped for.

Ragged breathing sounds from behind us, and I look up sharply at Scootaloo who’s standing, keyhole saw out at her side, and staring at the both of us with eerie stillness.

“Take her together?” Ghostface says as they turn to face the last of the Legion.

“Hold on,” I say softly as I stand and hold out a placating hand. “Scoots? Help me out here… is there anything left of you in there?”

She gave Rainbow Dash a hint. That’s the stand-out for me. It tells me she’s not on the same page as her patron, so I hope… but that was before I ripped Ormond apart and drowned these three in the Fog.

For a long, painful moment, I’m certain that the answer I’m going to get will just be another inchoate shriek and a blind charge.

I’m not gonna lie, if I can avoid that then I will because I’m not doing great. My face is bleeding freely, as are about two dozen shallow cuts across my arms and chest that refuse to clot. Ghostface is holding up a little more gracefully but isn’t in much better shape; their black robes and leathers do a good job of hiding it, but they’ve got some ragged cuts and broad stains across their body that speak of equally deep damage.

“Come on…” I say under my breath, “come on!”

Slowly, Scootaloo raises her free hand and presses it to the face of her mask. It’s like watching someone try to rip their own face off. She grips the mask tight and pulls, and a low, miserable moan spills out of her that turns into a roar of agony as she gives a hard yank, then another, and another, and on the final pull there’s a sound like a whole sheaf of paper being ripping in half as Scootaloo tears the mask from her face and throws it to the ground with a wooden clatter.

She looks like death.

“I knew it,” I say as I step past Ghostface.

Scootaloo meets my gaze with a glassy expression that flicks between us, then down to her friends, and a brief, achingly painful flicker of emotion crosses her features.

“Are they…?” She rasps, her voice raw from her howls and shrieks.

“Alive,” Ghostface says, their voice crackling, “and free of the Fog.”

They raise the Lesser Knife, and I can’t say why but somehow the blade seems more… more real than it did when I saw it before. I don’t like that, but at the same time, there isn’t much I can do about it. Ghostface is here to retrieve the Old Stain’s Fog, and if this is how Ghosty is going about collecting it, then so much the better.

Let them take as much of the damn stuff back where it belongs as they can.

“Good,” Scootaloo says after a moment, a smile ghosting across thin, chapped lips. “That’s… that’s good, y’know?”

“I’m not done,” Ghostface says.

“Hey!” I snarl, turning on them. “She’s—!”

“—a slave to the Thief,” Ghostface cuts me off. “Besides, her power belongs to Father.”

“It’s okay, Sunset, I knew it would be like this, or, y’know, something like this,” Scootaloo says, gesturing around her. “But I’m just… I’m so tired.”

The last words come out as a sob, and Scootaloo wraps her arms around herself as she slowly collapses to her knees like a mannequin losing its strings in slow motion. She takes several shuddering breaths as she looks up at us, her expression is twitchy and unsteady, and I can see her losing the fight with the Killer inside of her.

“Please,” Scootaloo begs, “just let me rest.”

My throat closes up at the sheer exhaustion and despair in Scootaloo’s voice, and I look over to Ghostface, silently asking the question I don’t quite have the stomach to put into words.

“Yeah,” Ghostface replies quietly, their modulator barely crackling. “The Lesser Knife will rip out the Fog, and she’ll die for good, there won’t be enough left to fuel her Survivor biology with all the punishment she took before she was ascended.”

“Please, Sunset,” Scootaloo cries. “Everything hurts all the time. Breathing hurts. Living hurts. Just… just fucking ‘being’ hurts! I can’t even remember what it was like when it didn’t hurt. I’m so tired, I just… I just wanna sleep… I just want to stop hurting.”

I swallow thickly. This shouldn’t be this hard. I hate them. Or I did. I should! Except… the way Scootaloo is begging. She didn’t deserve this. None of them did. I didn’t deserve to die like I did, just like none of them deserved any of this. It’s all shit, every last bit of it, and it’s my fault. Now, all I can do is let a little girl die so she can have a breath of peace.

Killer’s aren’t supposed to be able to cry. What a rip-off.

“Yeah,” I say finally. “Yeah, okay, just come here.”

I hold out my arms and Scootaloo stands and stumbles forward, her limbs only barely obeying her commands, until she collapses into my embrace. I wrap my arms around her, cradling her as I pull her hood back, letting her short, ragged, purple hair fall loose.

“It’ll be quiet soon,” I promise as I slowly kneel, and pull Scootaloo against me, letting her bury her face in my chest as I look up at Ghostface. “Just give me a second, okay?”

To my surprise, Ghostface just kneels beside the both of us and nods.

Dying again would be so much easier than this. So much easier than holding on to Scootaloo while she clutches at my collar and the edges of my jacket like a child trying to hold on to her mother. With as much care as I can with my hideous hands, I pull her into my lap, thread my bladed fingers through her hair, and start to sing.

“One, two, Sunny’s coming for you~”

I stroke her hair, rocking her back and forth as I hum and sing as gently as I can manage with my broken voice.

“Three, four, better lock your door~”

Scootaloo sobs in my arms as I pet her hair, and as my hand reaches the end of a long stroke, I press the tip of one finger to the base of her skull and puncture through with a single, smooth press.

“Five, six, grab your crucifix~”

She goes slack, relaxing in a wash of dreams as I force the fevered rage of the Legion into the rearmost quarters of her mind before looking up to Ghostface and nodding.

“Seven, eight, better stay up late~”

I sing the song as steadily as I can while Ghostface moves around us, wrapping a dark-clad arm around the both of us as they stare down across Scootaloo’s shivering frame. There’s a faint sensation of pressure being released, and this time I get a glimpse of something in the well of Ghostface’s dark eyes.

The barest glimmer of crimson light.

“Found you.”

They don’t hesitate, and I’m grateful for that. In the space of a breath, Ghostface positions the Lesser Knife just under Scootaloo’s heart and drives it home.

Scootaloo jerks violently. I grip tight, refusing to let her go out the way I did: cold, bitter, and so fucking alone. I hold her as she spasms—as Fog and emerald lightning spit and spark from her body. This time, Ghostface pulls the blade out carefully, tensing so hard that blood spills from the cuts on their body so they can remove the blade gently, until every inch of the Lesser Knife comes free.

Thunder bellows overhead.

“Nine… t-ten… never sleep again~”

Scootaloo goes fully slack this time. There’s nothing left inside of her. No flicker of a mind. No heartbeat. She’s so quiet.

“D-Damn it,” I mumble, pulling Scootaloo close and burying my face against her bloody chest.

A hand settles on my shoulder, and I look up, blinking away tears that fall like pitch to find Ghostface staring down at me. Maybe it’s my imagination, but it’s almost like they feel sorry for me.

“Let’s go,” they say quietly. “We can come back for the other two, but we need to leave her here. The body is toxic.”

My shoulders shake as a violent shudder runs through me. Even though I know, logically, that there’s nothing of Scootaloo left in the body I’m holding, abandoning her corpse up here just feels obscene.

“I’ll come back to bury her,” I say quietly as I lower her to the ground.

“Okay,” Ghostface says, surprising me again with their lack of argument. “I’ll come help.”

Despite myself, I smile as Ghostface gets an arm under me and pulls me to my feet. I hate that I actually kind of like them. I wish I knew who they used to be. I feel like, once upon a time, they might’ve been really kind.

Maybe we could have even been friends.

“Thank yo—”

The last syllable dies with the metallic rack of a lever-action rifle chambering a round, and I spin about, trying to find the source before they can fire. I spot them—the Deathslinger, crouched in the shadow of the eaves near the ruined entrance with their rifle raised—and the moment I lay eyes on the deadly Killer, I know I’m too late.

They have me dead to rights, and I’m too tired and too worn to summon enough magic to flicker on the fly.

Shit. I was so close.

“SUNSET!”

Ghostface’s modulated voice sparks and cracks with their scream as the Deathslinger pulls the trigger. The gunshot is deafening, a thunderous report that launches their brutal harpoon.

A hard impact crashes against my chest, and suddenly my vision is filled with black as something wet and viscous sprays me across the face.

“Got… you…” Ghostface breathes raggedly, gripping my shoulders where they’d found leverage to push me out of the way.

“W-What?” I mutter.

I look down a little, just below their mask, at the thick, heavy, barbed harpoon sticking a full hand’s-length out of their shoulder, right through where their heart would be if they were still human.

Author's Note

Success so clearly in view... or is it merely a trick of the light?

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