The Purifier

Chapter 2: Aid from Aftermath

The Void.

The all-encompassing nothingness of infinite volume where no sense of grounding could ever be found.

All too often I felt myself trapped within it, as I am at this very moment, my thoughts only able to retread where they’ve been before as my mind is too sluggish to think of anything new.

I did slowly begin to recall what led me here, though this time it was a bit different; sharper, louder, far less painful, even if it was a way I was not used to. This time, my mind was lost not from of sex, but from lightning.

I felt a small grin coming on my face as I recalled that, but that feeling allowed my to realize that I could feel. My thoughts, and the expressions thereby, turned to confusion at that; I was struck by lightning, was I not? And not just struck by a lightning bolt, by a rather massive one, and while near a city that created it in the first place, so the residents would likely take advantage of my comatose state rather than heal me...

I pushed my mind to my body to feel for any pain, yet I found none. I swiftly felt for any painkiller spells, but the results were also negative. I took several moments to think upon how this came to be, yet with finding no solution, I merely resolved to revel in the impossible tranquility with a small smile on my face that I do not recall having since more than a decade past.

The serenity of it all flowed through me and cleansed my soul, clearing my mind and voiding the blinding wrath I wished to have wrought upon my enemies. The calmness around me was the scent of many differing flowers, the feel warm and snug, and the sound filled with a faint, rhythmic wind, albeit one that was slightly ragged.

‘Wait...’

As I pondered on that last fact and its consequences, I was soon accompanied by a feeling that I was being watched.

I cracked my eyes open, being slightly blinded by the bright light of the magic lantern on the ceiling above me, and also hearing a gasp from not far to my left. I turned my head to face it, and saw standing a few paces away a pale red unicorn with a large violet swoop of a mane, leaving only half of her face visible to stare at me with concern and timidity. She seemed to be a nurse, with her white lab coat and a lilac heart wrapped in a bandage on it that was likely her cutie mark.

My gaze was drawn back to myself, finding a light grey blanket resting atop me with a midnight blue bed below. I tentatively lifted it off my body and slid out of it to sit on the edge of the bed, allowing me to see violet long-sleeved shirt covering my upper body, indigo jeans my lower besides my tail, and my feet bereft of any boots. I spotted a glimpse of a black mark on my right wrist as I looked at myself, and I tossed a glance to the other pony before I took the end of the right sleeve of my shirt and started to pull it down, and saw a jagged black scar running along my wrist.

I stared at it for a long while, thoughts running through my head as to all of its facets, and I eventually begun to move my left hand towards it. When I touched the scar, I felt no pain, but I could feel that something was pressing against it. When I rubbed and pressed it, still no pain came, even though I could still feel it perfectly well.

I quickly drew the rest of my sleeve down, showing the scar to exist upon the rest of my arm, though more jagged and frayed lower down. My left sleeve was pulled down next, showing a similar scar upon it, and a larger web-like one on my chest when I pulled the hem of the shirt up over it.

The similar nature of the scars gave me a thought, and thus I pulled the shirt up my arms, letting me see all of the obsidian black marks to be connected, as though it were a web centralized upon my chest.

“What... is this?” I asked as I turned my head to the nurse, seeing unnecessary to check if the same lines existed upon my legs.

“Um, that is a fractal scar...” She replied quietly, a light blush adorning her face, likely from the brevity of the modesty of my chest. I quickly took pulled the shirt back to cover myself, letting her continue, “It’s caused by lightning... but it’s not supposed to be that big.”

“Well, I do believe I was struck by a very large lightning bolt,” I replied, “But I don’t feel any pain from this; is that normal?”

The violet-maned pony shook her head and said, “Definitely not. I think it might of done something to your magic though... Um, I’m not sure if you can tell...”

I looked up at my horn and saw the usual deep orchid spiral around it to be somewhat frayed, a pattern that reminded my of something of my past. When I let my horn up, I saw the aura around it to be brighter, but also more jagged, more frayed... more akin to lightning.

“Huh,” I let out while looked back at the nurse, “I... think the lightning channeled through my horn, mixing itself into my magic.” She responded with a small ‘oh’ as she returned my gaze. “I’ve actually seen these patterns before,” I gestured to the frays on my horn, “On dispersion rings, specifically those that somepony has tried to escape from via pure power.” The memories of those few times I saw those rings flashed though my mind, the labyrinthine channels wrapping around them meant to take magic input and make it dissociate with itself, thus terminating it.

“I-I heard the lightning actually...” The coral-skinned mare said after a few moments. “I saw you leaving the city, and I wanted to make sure you didn’t get r-raped again...” She added timidly, hiding further behind her mane.

I smiled as I heard her say that; nopony these days ever offers me kindness. But I suppose it makes sense she did, what with her being Pure and likely having been raped multiple times in the past, based on how she reacted to the word itself. “Thank you,” I replied, making her look back at me and gain a small grin as she saw mine. She continued to look at me for a few moments before she got an embarrassed blush and looked away.

I let out a small laugh at her cute response, then turning my gaze to look around the room I was in, finding it to be a rather small bedroom with deep lavender wallpaper adorned with many silver and golden stars, very similar to my own attire. I hypothesized her to be a fan, and the large stack of posters a saw covering another wall confirmed that. “Sorry if I’m making you uncomfortable,” I said as I glanced back at her, “I don’t mean to embarrass a fan.” Her blush became more noticeable as it turned from bittersweet to scarlet, but I eventually cut it off with, “Do you mind telling you me your name?”

“Hm?” She let out as she looked back at me, “O-oh! I’m Violet Gauze... I, um...”

“The Great and Powerful Trixie,” I replied as I extended my open hand towards her. “But I assume you know that already,” I added, a wayward glance cast around the room to show what I meant.

Violet blushed even harder while she moved closer to me and lightly shook my hand. “U-um... I-I like your shows...” She said, making me smile a bit brighter as she pulled her hand back quickly. “A-and your... um...” She continued, but trailed off while she started to shake and blush yet brighter. I looked at her with concern for a few seconds before she stuttered out faintly, “L-l-looks...”

I blushed lightly at her compliment before she quickly added, “B-but not l-like... the, um...”

“The corrupt way, of course,” I finished, getting a nod out of the other unicorn. “Too often I have had others judge me for my ‘mediocre’ visage, always making snide remarks about my lack of sexuality and power despite how well-tempered it all is...” I sighed in reminiscence.

“Y-yeah...” Violet replied with an sympathetic tone as she looked downward in sorrow, confirming that she had been victim to the same unprivileged prejudice that had been wrought upon me many times.

I returned my gaze to the room around me to curb the awkwardness of the silence, and soon found myself a little worried. “Where...” I begun, but trailed off to restart, “You did find my cape and hat on me, did you not?”

The timid unicorn looked up at me and gasped lightly before saying, “Yes, I did.” She quickly turned around and picked something up off of a chair behind her while adding, “They, um, are kind of badly damaged though...” Shen then slowly turned back around to present my showmare attire to me.

I gasped as I saw them; my usually pristine deep purple cape and hat were now separated into many pieces, each with scorched fringes and blackened with soot and dirt. I sighed somberly as I took them from the other mare and muttered, “They weren’t exactly in great shape before I was smote...” After a couple moments of sorrowful reminiscing, I set the pile of scraps on the bed and responded, “Thank you, though. I still prefer having them, even if they are in such a state.”

Violet flashed a small smile for a few seconds before giving a small yawn. She blushed slightly while she said, “S-sorry, I’m not really used to being up this late...”

I nodded and glanced out of the window behind me and saw that it was very dark out, perhaps around midnight. ‘Wait...’ I thought, then added out loud, “I was struck late at night...” I turned to the nurse, “How long have I been out?”

Her expression turned conflicted for a moment before replying, “A-about a day...”

I closed my eyes and nodded slowly in assent, then started to think, ‘That’s not good; that stint with those other ponies likely earned me a spike in notice, so they may be here soon...’ I kept myself in contemplation until a faint sound rose me from it, seeming to be odd whirring sound that was rather muted. I opened my eyes and glanced around the room quickly to locate its source, and, not finding it, turned back to Violet, who was somewhat pale as she stared out the window. Following her gaze, I found a large group of royal guardsponies outside, all staring at us in stern disdain.

“Damn it...” I muttered, my voice replete with irritation. “Well,” I started, making me and my newest friend look at each other, “Got no other choice, I suppose.”

Fear and irritation was seeping into me as I stepped outside the small, two-story house that was located on the fringes of Manehattan, Violet grabbed on to my wrist as she followed close behind, shaking and panting heavily with terror. The guardsponies surrounded us in a hemisphere, their rage so strong that it managed to boil through their stoic facades.

“So...” I began, winning no favours from my adversaries with my interruption. “What doth thou wish to inflict upon Us now that thou hath captured Us?” I asked, going into the older Equestrian speak as it helped calm my nerves to think of the closest friend I ever had, and also to irritate everypony that didn’t like it.

“You are going to come with us to Canterlot,” One of the guards bellowed, “So that the princesses may punish you for your misdeeds.”

I rolled my eyes at how obvious that statement was, then replied calmly, “And if We refuse?”

“Then we fight and defeat you, then bring you back to the castle.”

A scoff came from me as I heard that. ‘The confidence of these ponies,’ I thought with a smirk, ‘It’s just pathetic.’ “We’ll see about that.”

The nearly half of the ponies surrounding me and Violet that were unicorns all lit their horns, and I pulled my right arm around my friend’s shoulders and looked at the rainbow of lights surrounding us. ‘...three, two, one...’ I counted in my mind, ‘...aaaaannd, now!’ I quickly deployed a swath of illusionary mist and ducked, pulling the other mare with me to dodge the barrage of magic blasts fired where we were just standing.

We deftly ran from the center of the mist as I rendered us invisible, casting our visage across from us so that when our attackers fled the mist as well, their bolts were not aimed at us. We kept running, and I soon felt a magic ping race across me, but I still felt confident as the illusion I created earlier could also be detected with my magic signature, and was amplified so much that my actual body was negligible in comparison.

We managed to get a few blocks away from the guardsponies before a blast blew through the air no more than a couple meters above me. Another blazed by to the side quickly after, and I killed my invisibility to better focus on a shield I then cast behind me, slanted so that it wouldn’t take as much damage whenever hit. The next one hit the shield and got deflected, but a several more trailed it for the few seconds before I noticed the wind gusts behind me, signifying pegasi were coming up on us.

Knowing my illusionary projections wouldn’t fool them for any longer, I killed them and shifted the shield to cover me and my friend’s bodies. I felt many more bolts hit them as I tried to build up a teleport with an illusion to cover it, but it was interrupted by a particularly strong hit directly into the face of the spheroid surrounding us, making me wince enough for the shield to drop for a fraction of a second, but that was enough for a pegasus to strike me clean across the face at speed, throwing me back a ways.

My vision and hearing were blurred as I slammed into the ground and rolled several rotations back, landing with my face in the loose tiles of stone. I tried to clear my head while I started to push myself off the ground, not getting very far before something hit my horn, and I felt the power on it dull.

‘Dispersion ring,’ I thought with incredible disdain, ‘Cowards. Have they no honour?’ I quickly got to my feet, but got just as quickly thrust back down by somepony tackling me, and continuing to hold me down onto my back after I slammed back into the ground.

My senses soon cleared enough to feel the guard on me straddling my abdomen and pressing both of my shoulders into the ground, but I swiftly drew my attention across the way to Violet, who was aggressively attempting to pull away from two guards holding her from her arms. Another pony then approached her, however this one wasn’t a guard, but was a mage.

I saw the mage start to cast a spell on the nurse, and quickly threw her into a trance, but I knew what that would soon turn into. I turned my focus to my magic as I flared it up, feeling it flow and get cancelled out by the ring on it, and I quickly began to map the ring.

What may be surprising to many is that dispersion rings can be escaped from. The way the rings work is by taking in a magical aura from from the bottom and putting it through a mathematically-designed labyrinth that makes the aura destructively interfere with itself, rendering magic put into it null... in most cases.

See, the flow of a magical aura can actually be manipulated outside of just spell creation. While more common and macroscopic versions of this have magic bolts or beams curving around to hit targets from different sides, a more minor and typically less useful way to manipulate an aura is to shape it, and that shape is what is inputted into a dispersion ring.

Most ponies imagine those rings as completely cancelling out any input, but if one cycles through aura shapes by trial and error, they can make the rings spark with their magic in some spots. This happens because different aura shapes get cancelled out differently, but there is always at least one shape that it won’t cancel out. In fact, those shapes trap the magic in the ring and make it feed into itself, making it figuratively explode in power, and eventually making the ring literally explode.

I have done this many times in the past, and have exceedingly proficient at it; however, this time took a bit longer given the new, much more jagged shape of my aura, but I succeeded regardless.

The ring exploded in an orchid flash, several shards blasting away at speed with one in particular hitting an eye of the guard holding me down, allowing me to shoot to my feet while the other ponies took a shocked, fearful glance at me. I turned at ran towards Violet, blasting the guards and mage holding my friend and swiftly tackling her away from them. We rolled for a few moments, at the end of which she was laying face-up on the ground and I was right above her, holding my breath while scared that I may have been too late as I looked down at her.

The purple-maned unicorn below me shook her head to clear it, then looked up at me with a mix of shock and admiration. I was about to say something when her visage turned sultry, and she said, “Oh, excited, are we?”

“No,” I muttered quietly in disbelief. “No, no, no, no, no...” I quickly shot up off of her and backpedaled a few paces away. “Bastards... every damned time...”

The previously pure mare stood up and continued to stare at me lustfully, but now had a hint of sadness as she asked, “‘No’? I thought you were my friend...”

“I was Violet’s friend,” I replied while slowly resuming my backward movement. “You are not Violet.” I didn’t wait for a response before bolting off in the other direction, fully sprinting away from the guards and my former friend.

As what happened with my previous flight, a bolt of magic flew by me and was quickly followed by numerous others as I put a slanted shield up, and a pegasus flew up on each of my sides and couple meters above the ground. I blasted the one to my left with the bolt being its new lightning-esque shape, and similarly to lightning, it electrified her, instantly flaring her wings and spiking her into the ground. I got surprised from that, but quickly reigned it in to blast the other pegasus, the shot being dodged at first, but I bent its path back towards them, and making them befall the same fate as their partner.

I continued running as I turned by thoughts back onto that electric component of my magic, saying in my mind, ‘My magic doesn’t normally do that... but that bolt that hit me must’ve truly fused with my magic, altering its very nature...’ I had to cut that line of thought off when several more pegasi came up around me, but it soon came back into play as it gave me an idea. ‘I wonder...’

I flared up my horn again, and after relinquishing the shield behind me, I quickly prepared a small magic disruption blast (a full-surround blast of magic that disrupt other magic if it’s powerful enough), then set it off. True to my idea, all of the pegasi’s wings flared somewhat, swiftly changing their directions and diverting them from their attacking course. ‘Heh heh, nice.’

Some of the guards managed to gain their control after a moment and fly back to me, but they struggled to keep up with me, strain and bewilderment visible on their faces as they kept getting pushed farther behind me. When they eventually faded from view, my attention way drawn to the environment around me, and I saw it was all a blur, even though I could understand it all as though I was merely jogging.

‘Woah,’ I thought, taking that all in. I looked down at my body and found it to be in a similar state, though with orchid lightning pulsing around it and trailing behind me, allowing me to deduce, ‘The lightning must have fused me in entirety, not just my magic, making my limbs move faster and my brain process quicker...’ I quickly shook my head as I did not want to be thinking in this moment; the wind blowing past my face and the quick foot-taps below made feel truly relaxed in a way that I have not been in a very long time.