She-Who-Ruled looked upon the world, and she spoke a Word - and the world learned that the light can burn.

Aezilan. Throughout the entirety of the starless void of the Outer Beyond - mortals look up at the sky, and they see it. Shining with a burning lavender light, carving through time and space itself - as Twilight Sparkle reminds the world of the lesson that She-Who-Ruled taught to it so long ago.

At the edge of thought, at the very brink of consciousness and madness itself - at the furthest reaches of the twitching, putrid corpse of the universe itself, there is a Thing. It is a thing of a thousand names, of a thousand faces - it is the greatest of its kind and the smallest altogether.

There is a word. A word, so terrible - that its mere utterance damages time and space.

The word is Usaglorsiaca, and it has taken notice of Aezilan.

Steelshy opened her eyes - and looked upon the thing that stood in Twilight Sparkle’s place.

It was only very faintly equine. It stood as tall as Celestia, with wings of flaming mana arcing from its back. Its coat was a shade of lavender so rich and pure that it hurt to look at - and that was only the surface of its horror.

The air rolled as lavender-tinted waves of pure mystical might oozed off it. The surface of its coat was unmarred and whole - but at the same time, it was broken and battered - filled with holes that had gnashing teeth and blinking eyes. There were thousands of eyes all over it - growing, wriggling tendrils of lavender flesh that bit at the air. There were too many limbs and too many wings that it seemed evershifting and stationary simultaneously.

Its head was strange. It looked - disjointed from the rest of its body. Its flesh did not pulse or grow; it did not curl or writhe. It was the head of a dragon, wrapped in the flesh of a pony instead of expected scales - with four sets of unblinking, pure lavender eyes. The horn of an alicorn, not a unicorn, adorned its head - a spearlike appendage that reached towards the sky and pulsed with power. The horn was in-between a pair of ornate, deer-like antlers like grasping hands, slowly curling and writhing as they shrank and grew. It was not the pain of her putrefying wing stump that caused Steelshy to let out a soft whimper. Rather, its mouth. There were far too many teeth, and the deeper that Steelshy looked, the more teeth and void she saw.
ABOMINATION, the Iampex cried out. Its voice was terrible, its bulk continuing to grow unfettered as it feasted on the ambient magic of the air - feeding off of Twilight’s own power, with no end in sight. The gardens began to rot, and the Adamantia that bound Discord began to weaken.

Twilight Sparkle paid no heed to the Iampex. She felt the world underneath her - inspected the atoms beneath her hooves that she could reach out and bat away with a swipe. She felt the air rush and curl around her; she could hear the sap running in her own veins and the heartbeat of every creature within a mile. She could see the Iampex shying away from her light even as it pulsed with more darkness - and she deemed it unworthy of her prolonged attention.

ABOMINATION! MONSTER! The Iampex cried out with more vigor - but it couldn’t hide the slight hint of fear in its tone. It struck - hundreds of lances of utter darkness, tearing through the light and striking into Twilight. They burned up against her aura or crushed themselves against her skin - only one penetrating through her, straight through her heart.

“Yes,” Twilight Sparkle agreed.

The air was magic - it always had been, and it always would be. There would always be - magic. And now - she was magic.

“Let me in.”
No, Twilight Sparkle thought. The Iampex was a creature - a small, middling thing that was barely worthy of the attention she had already given it. She was an infant god - she knew no combat spells, no warspells, no spells to call up fire or summon the elements. She could cut space and curve it - but nothing else.

It was a good thing that she didn’t need anything else.

“Let me in.”
No, Twilight Sparkle thought. She cast her senses out, gathering the world itself in around her - absorbing the information even as she took it into her shining, searing Light. She could feel Steelshy behind her - a bubbling cauldron of fading magic that felt - old, much older than the rest of her pegasus magic. To her side, there was a seemingly endless pool of chaos - thinking about it hurt her head, so Twilight disregarded the information.

She had the light and heat in the air, the magic of a dying pony, and nothing else to work with.

“Let me in.”
No, Twilight Sparkle thought. And so - within her magic, she held onto every drop of heat and light that she could. The Iampex was afraid of both these things, so Twilight pulled them together in her magical grasp and mixed them together into one. A searing point of Light formed a meter from her chest. The air shrieked as it boiled and popped, the atoms melting away into a soup of searing cosmic Light. The orb shot forward through space, carving through the bulk of the Iampex - where it struck, the darkness and absence of the abomination were destroyed. The sheer amount of magic compacted into a single space broke reality as Gilgamesh the Great’s principle was pushed to its very limit - reality distorting to such a degree that crack-like veins of rainbowspread through space - pulsing and flashing a thousand different colors.

The shard of the Iampex didn’t stand a chance, as it - along with half the gardens, were consumed in one horrible flash of Light.

She stood there for a moment, basking in her work - a slight smile spreading over her face. There was something - beautiful about it. Where her spell, little more than pure telekinesis, struck - the world had been sliced down with near-atomic precision. Yet, aside from the lingering reality fracture, there was no trace of anything caught in her blast.

The Infant God glanced down at the dying mare behind her. There was a chunk of growing absence on her wing - slowly spreading like a corrosive virus, threatening to consume her. She could see through the thin barrier of flesh - she could see Steelshy’s heartbeat beginning to fade even as she could hear it.

“Let me in.”
No, Twilight Sparkle thought. She knew as little of healing as she did of warfare - so she reached out with her telekinesis, and the Infant God pulled the absence out from the dying mare with ease. There was a bloody rip, a scream - and blood. The good monster found herself acutely aware of how lovely that blood smelled - and wondered if it would be so bad if she was a bad monster for just a moment.

“Let me in.”
Twilight Sparkle did not say no - her mouth fell open, lavender-colored spittle oozing from her gaping maw. Her teeth grew longer, sharper - more jagged, and she opened her mouth to say a word-

And then she could hear the drum-beat of Celestia’s heart, and it was fading.

The gardens shattered underneath her. Ethereal wings spread as she took flight for the first time - moving as a blinding blur towards the base of the Canterhorn. The entire mountain floor was consumed, drowning in a sea of wriggling void - while Twilight had destroyed a section of the Iampex with ease, this was the beast in its entirety. Gluttoned on the magic of a divine - of her divine.

Twilight smelled Celestia’s blood, oozing from her wounds. She could hear her bones begin to crack, a scream tear itself from her lungs -

the world
became
fire.

Nature began to scream as she dropped down at the center of its absence like a bullet. Her telekinesis rolled out haphazardly, messily - like an enraged infant or a wild animal, lashing out at the world. She gripped and tore the Iampex into shreds; she crushed and ground it underneath her - but the Iampex grew and grew more as it consumed her magic greedily.

That - wasn’t possible. It shouldn’t have been possible. Twilight was magic - she was magic. And yet, the Iampex was feeding on her magic, taking it from her - feeding on her. How was it doing that?

DIE, the Iampex stated.

There was a thread, a thread of - something, connected up to the sky - a wriggling black line that pushed past the False Sky, curled past the True Bodies, and into the spiraling starless void of the Outer Beyond - and then it looped back around. Twilight found it, even as the darkness began to roll over her in crashing waves - even as Celestia’s ribs began to crack and shatter. It was connected to her. It was feeding - off her.

Twilight gripped onto it with her telekinesis - but she found that she could not. Her efforts were met with a wall - she had the power of an Infant God, the power to destroy, and the power to bend the world to her will - but she didn’t know enough. The thread resisted her, and she couldn’t break it.

“let me in.”

The Iampex screamed a million screams - its thousands of mouths crying out in agony as the shadows grew longer and bit, and the light grew harsh and began to burn. The True Sun wept as spears of sunlight were wrought from the beyond, crackling bolts of lightning that blew apart huge chunks of flesh - waves of fire, biting darkness, Hellfire called up from the depths of the Umberfoal, Skyfire wrought down from the very Heavens themselves. The magic of the Children, the magic of utter destruction -

“Twilight?” Celestia whispered. The Infant God did not hear her, even as she brought forth her rolling destruction. In the wake of her vicious magic, there wasn’t so much as an atom left.

Celestia spoke more words that Twilight did not hear. The Iampex was a sniveling, weeping thing - it tried to cry out in a sound beyond words but found that it could not - for the monster that wore Twilight’s flesh had stripped its voice away. Her magic pushed deeper, deeper - until it was a drop, the smallest drop in an ocean of light - globs of the divinity that it had grown fat on rising out into the air, shards of the Sun itself and of the endless Void-

Celestia’s wings curled around the monster.

The world broke. Flesh cracked and tore as eyes fused shut, mouths snapping close - and weeping in Celestia’s trembling hooves, there was Twilight.

There are two types of royal guards. First, they serve underneath the Captain of the Royal Guard - the mare or stallion appointed directly by the Head Judicator themselves, and then there are the Judicators.

It was the Judicators who saved the lives of hundreds of thousands as they, with the help of the Royal Guard - erected barriers to protect against the Iampex’s devastating warspells. It was they who guarded Canterlot with their very lives - keeping a death count that would’ve been in the six digits down to the mere double digits.

Despite this - they are all punished, for the death of one is the death of too many. The punishment seems unfair - but the Judicators accept it with open arms. The Head Judicator himself is not spared - in fact, it is he who receives the harshest punishment of all.

Their training regimen is known to none save Celestia and Goldspur. It’s rigorous - and they constantly train against the most significant threats that Equestria could possibly face. They stand as the last line of defense, training for fights they hope will never come. They train for every conceivable scenario - from the return of Discord and Nightmare Moon to something more apocalyptic such as the Eldest Daughter breaking free or the return of Grogar the Great or She-Who-Ruled.

For the last three weeks, they have trained against a foe whose arrival seems ever more likely. A guarantee rather than a possibility. He is the Wolf, the Immortal, the General - a thousand names, a thousand titles. They train, knowing that they will do little more than slow him down - that with the deaths of all their ranks, they would do as little more than take precious minutes from him.

They know how he fights. He fights as a feral berserker, with no regard to his safety - for there is none. The destruction of his brain does little more than give him momentary pause - and his regeneration is never consistent. A limb may regenerate in an hour or seconds - or so fast that it was hardly even destroyed in the first place. They know that his blade - Cryogenesis, can carve through their armor as if it was hardly there. They know that he can freeze magic, crush them underneath the weight of a thousand stars with his mind alone -

The militants of the Church of the Nightmare knew none of this. Maybe, if they had - then they would have known that it was futile.

Entrails decorated the floor as he dragged Archmagus Starlight Glimmer by her horn. The keratin had been stripped off, the ley exposed to the open air - arguably more painful than if it had been cleanly snapped off, for the air and his grip rubbing against the ley was utter agony. The ground was soaked with blood, ice, water - driblets of piss and shit that had been torn free from the intestines that Cryogenesis had loosed itself into.

“Do you want to know the funny part of this, Archmagus?” The wolf’s grin was predatory as he pulled her through the corpses of foals, of ponies that she had known - in her writhing, thrashing, and feral pain - she managed to catch a glimpse of Trixie’s half-crushed skull.

“Monster.” Starlight whimpered out. Frost nodded as his claws dug tighter into her ley.

“Aren’t I?”

He twitched and sent her body crashing into a wall. Her spine shattered, her legs growing numb - and her ribs slowly poking out of her flesh. By all rights - with the degloving of her horn and the sheer amount of trauma that she had endured, she should’ve passed out and died. But magic - sickly green vines curled into her and kept her conscious, kept her alive to survive.

“The funny part of this, Archmagus - apart from how sickeningly undeserving of my fucking title you are,” he stood at the highest peak of their encampment - even as it burned and rotted around him. “Is that I didn’t want to do this.”

“W-why? Why?” Starlight whispered. Her eyes watered as she reached up a hoof towards him. He gripped onto her carpus and squeezed - crushing the bones and ligaments down to dust before he tore the limb off with a messy rip. Starlight screamed.

“Your goddess asked me to. Isn’t that funny, Starlight?” He gripped onto her horn with both his hands. He squeezed tighter and tighter - and only when Starlight felt as if it might shatter, he tore.

Starlight’s horn tore from her head with a section of her brain. Her cries were deafening as her body twitched, Frost’s sickly, cruel magic forcing her to endure throughout it. He held her horn up towards the sky.

“The Stars will aid in her escape. You know - I thought that sounded a little dumb. Stars are just - little balls of plasma floating in the Beyond. Sure - they spew out magic like nobody’s business, but they can’t do anything by themselves. I think that whoever wrote that prophecy forgot a phrase.”

“I think that the full thing,” the wolf continued, “is that - the Starlight will aid in her escape. Heh - get it? Cause - yeah.” He nodded. “You get it.” He held her horn up towards the sky. It flashed with a bright green light - the magic that held Starlight’s life within her body being torn out of her in a thin green stream as it was sucked into her horn.

Starlight’s corpse fell to the ground as Frost crushed her horn into a thin powder in his paws. He dusted himself off quickly before he glanced at the message he had scrawled in some poor soul’s blood on his forearm.

He sniffed a few times, tilting his head up into the air - before his tail began to wag. He moved with unnatural speed, bounding through the ankle-thick pools of blood - until he found his prey.

Feathery wings, lined with steel - hooves capped with blades, a dark blue coat, and a streak of Fuschia through her white mane. Her legs were crushed into bloody pulps, one of her wings bent at a jagged angle, and the other messily torn from her back.

Frost kneeled down and gripped tightly onto General Shadow Sprint’s head. He tilted her chin up - her eyes blurry as life was beginning to fade from them, her face contorted into an equal look of horror, fear, and hatred.

Frost held her for a few moments like that - until he caught a glimmer of something moving in the darkness. Something - prismatic.

“Celestia sends her regards,” Frost smiled warmly at her. He shifted his angle so the filly would get a full view of it - grabbing onto her head with both hands before he slammed her head down into the ground. Her skull erupted as her brain was sent flying in a pasty mess, chunks of gore and viscera seeping out into the floor. He rolled his eyes as he heard a stifled whimper that he pretended to ignore.

He left, then - but the filly didn’t step out of her hiding spot until far later. Underneath the broken corpse of her father, her coat made red from how blood-stained it was - her mane messy and matted - she slowly crawled out to see the corpse of her dead mother.

She wept. She wept for what felt like hours, tears flowing freely down her face. She cried until she could not cry anymore - and it was only then that she felt a strong hoof place down on her shoulder.

“Stand, Rainbow Dash.” The alicorn’s rich voice cut through the darkness.

“There is much work to be done.” Nightmare Moon smiled.

-

Author's Note

Behold! A discord server!

ReaderReads also wrote a lovely, rather canon-friendly story based off of Frost. Check it out!

TThe Wolf and the World-Soul

• MLP: FiM
• Dark
• Mystery

Fraezen ponders on his journey to Eos. He is afraid. When the Wolf and its Nothingness take over, however, there is not enough Fraezen left to fear.

• Death
• Other

ReaderReads · 2.3k words  ·  19  0 · 185 views