Dead Week

Totality awakened with her cheek pressed against the cold stone floor, chills wracking her body. She lifted her head, breathing shakily in the dimly lit environment. She tried to pull her hooves together in an effort to stand. A chain rattled behind her and she felt her hind leg stop with a jerk, a metal shackle pressing into her flesh.

“Totality?” called a familiar voice. “Are you okay?”

Totality turned to see the silhouettes of Gamma and Moondancer sitting on their haunches a few paces away. Their horns were… gone. She gasped and raised a hoof to her own horn to find it was nothing more than a stump. She tried a simple light spell, but nothing happened. She was magicless. “I’m… I don’t know,” she replied warily.

She looked about the room to see the dark forms of other unconscious ponies littering the floor. One unicorn was sitting up, weeping into her hooves. It was Hazy Sheen. The walls and ceiling of the chamber glowed a dim blue that warbled and pulsed slowly in intensity, a barrier that would prevent any entry, even by teleportation, except by the caster.

Along the periphery were ancient and long forgotten apparatuses used to cause bodily harm, a rack, spiked chair, metal cages and chains hanging from anchor points on the wall. Before her, laying on the floor, was Zoma’s mask. That was when it hit her; they were trapped in the blood seals for the raising ritual they'd feared. She was in one circle, Hazy in another, Gamma and Moondancer in the third with the personal effect, the mask placed at the nexus where the targeted deceased would rematerialize in a corporeal form.

Blue Moon had been busy. She must have stopped going to class entirely. She stood with her forelegs crossed, leaning casually with her back against the stone wall. Her magic enveloped a floating bonesaw as it worked its way back and forth through the horn of an unknown unconscious unicorn.

“Blue, stop,” demanded Totality. “This is completely insane!”

“Save your breath, Totality,” she replied without looking up. “I’ve already had this conversation with the three other awake ponies.”

“It’s true,” muttered Moondancer.

“You can’t seriously want to do this,” Totality retorted.

“I’m this far into it. What do you think?”

“If it's power you want, Zoma was defeated by the Pillars. Even if you succeed in this ritual, he’d have to defeat the Mane Six to conquer Equestria and they’re even more powerful.”

Blue rolled her eyes and sighed. “I already told you, we had this conversation.”

“It’s true,” repeated Moondancer.

"And who said anything about power? I just want an alicorn boyfriend… Nah, I'm just screwing with you,” she cackled. “But who's to say I can't get both, right?"

Totality shook her head. “Why did you use Comet Shard, of all ponies?”

“Gamma told you about that? I should have come after both of you sooner.” Blue paused in thought and then shrugged. “No real reason. He’s a whore who's easy to get alone. Everypony who’s here is either a loose end or an easy mark. It’s nothing personal. I just needed to collect a lot of sacrifices and also not get caught.”

“I’m sorry,” cried Hazy in between sobs.

“Oh, you’re sorry for getting us all killed?” growled Totality. “Thanks so much for your apology.” She clopped her hooves together in mock applause. “How did you even get yourself chained up?”

Blue tossed the newly sawed off horn in a bucket of other horns, making a solid clunk. “She’s here because we didn’t see eye to eye on the project direction. She was trying to fuck with Gamma when she found that grimoire on him. She took it, gave it to me, told me to find a way to plant it on you and get you expelled from the academy.”

Totality turned and glared daggers at Hazy.

“I didn’t mean for this to happen!” she cried, cowering in her restraint.

Blue rubbed her forehead. “I’m like, what the fuck, Hazy? You know what this is? You know what you could do with this? And you just want to throw it away to get your nemesis expelled?” She shrugged, laughing. “So I go, ‘yeah, sure, I’ll do that.’” She shook her head. “I didn’t do that. I did this instead. When she started driving me up the wall and asking too many questions about how getting you kicked out was going, I kind of had to just bring her down here.”

Suddenly Totality was pushed to the floor by Blue’s magic. Blue levitated the newest sacrifice, still unconscious, to Totality’s circle. She set him down and snapped a prearranged shackle around his hind leg. It was attached to the same metal ring that Totality’s chain was attached to. Once the new stallion was snugly secure, Blue released Totality.

Blue stretched out her forelegs on the floor. “Just one more,” she crooned. “Be back soon.” With that, she vanished in an electric blue fizzle.

Totality immediately laid out, lunging for the edge of the circle that surrounded her. She cried out in pain as the shackle dug in around her leg, stopping her just short of being able to touch the dried blood of the seal with her hoof. “Ugh, we have to scratch the seals!” shouted Totality, flailing against the extremity of her chain.”

“We’ve already tried,” replied Gamma, bashing his shackle with his hoof. “The chains are too short and nopony can reach the blood.”

Totality looked back at him, then to Moondancer who was struggling with her own restraint. She looked weird without her glasses. Totality felt her own face and found that unlike Moondancer, she’d made it there with her glasses on. She took them off and peered down at them, trying to formulate a new plan. It was the only tool available. Could it give her enough reach to alter the seal? The arms… The lenses… The glass. This could do even more for them, she realized, but they needed to do it quick.

Totality placed her glasses on the floor and carefully snapped off the right temple at the hinge. Then she snapped the square frame in half through the bridge. “Gamma,” she called, “Catch.” she pinched the temple of the intact half of her glasses between her hooves and flung it to Gamma. “Break the lens and cut yourself with the glass. Then use the arm to paint a strike through the flow node of your seal.

“Okay. I get it… But what’s that gonna do?” he asked, stepping down on the lens with a crunch.

“It causes a flow inversion,” she replied, crushing her own lens.

“Yeah, but what does that do?”

Totality shook her head. “It’s our best move to survive this. Just do it.” She nudged the glass pieces apart with her hoof and picked up the second biggest one. She turned to the other circle.

“Hazy! Stop crying and grab this piece of glass!” She flipped it to her, hearing the light tinkling on the stone floor. “You need to cut yourself deep enough to draw blood. Do it like your life depends on it, because it does.”

Totality gingerly picked up the biggest piece of glass from the floor with her lips, ignoring how disgusting and unsanitary this all was. She maneuvered it into her clenched teeth and drew the shard across her foreleg, and then once again until she felt hot rivulets begin to dribble down. Then she took the broken arm of her glasses in her mouth and slathered the bent end in the blood of her wound. Laying down with her forelegs outstretched, and the arm pincered between her hooves, she began painting the necessary alteration to the blood seal. The plastic didn’t retain much blood so she had to continually refresh it with more, but soon, even in the dim blue light of the barrier spell, she could see the dark line she’d created across the node symbol.

“Hazy,” she called. “Are you bleeding yet?”

“Y-yes,” she whimpered.

“Take this piece of my glasses and use it to paint with your blood.” She tossed the arm to her. “Directly behind you, there’s a symbol on the edge of your circle that looks like a zero. You need to put a horizontal strike through it.

Hazy swallowed nervously. “Okay,” she breathed, gathering up the discarded arm.

“It doesn’t take much, just a solid line of any thickness all the way across should do it. Gamma, did you do yours?”

“Yeah,” he exhaled.

With the addition of Totality, Blue had actually hit her sacrifice quota and didn’t even know it. Her upside down cutie mark made her worth three live ponies in a necromantic ritual. The only reason they were still alive was Blue’s unawareness of this fact.

“I think I got it,” reported Hazy, and none too soon.

The room flashed as Blue Moon returned with her latest prey. She skipped on the horn amputation for the final sacrifice, knowing that she wouldn’t wake up in time to use her magic to escape. Blue just put the unicorn mare straight into an empty shackle in Hazy’s circle. Then she sighed with relief and rolled her head from side to side to pop her neck. “Alright, one alicorn bad boy coltfriend, coming up.”

"There's still time to sing a song, unlock the shackles and hug it out," argued Totality.

Blue’s eyes shifted back and forth. "Hmm… Actually when you think about it, there really isn’t a good offramp for me at this point in the process."

"I know, but I had to try."

"Parole denied," declared Blue abruptly. Her horn charged with a glow and lightning arched from the tip to the edge of Hazy’s circle with a loud snap, like the crack of a big whip. The blood burned off of the floor in a ripple pattern, sending sparks swirling through the air. The symbols glowed white, but nopony inside them did as would have been usual.

Totality covered her eyes as the runes changed to black. Suddenly a black lightning bolt leapt back at Blue with a deafening bang, striking her on the horn. No pony was watching as Blue's flesh was rent and scattered through the air. A blast of warm blood sprayed across the remaining occupants of the room. The barrier enveloping the space dissipated, plunging everypony into total darkness.

Totality grunted and wiped off the part of her face that she hadn’t protected. “Should have read my thesis,” she muttered.

“Oh… neat trick, Totality,” panted Gamma.

“Thanks.”

“Ugh, is this what I think it is?” asked Moondancer, spitting.

Totality ran a foreleg over her mane, trying to detect how wet it was. “If what you think it is, is lots and lots of blood… then yes. Just be thankful we can’t see.”

“We’re still chained up and it’s pitch black,” cried Hazy. “What the hell do we do now?”

“I guess we have to just wait for the last unicorn in to wake up and pray that she knows how to aparate,” answered Totality.

“Or can scream very loudly,” added Gamma.

“Yes,” Gamma,” she sighed.

"Seriously? That's our only way out of here?" whined Hazy.

"Actually,” began Gamma, “since torture was abolished midway through the War of the Serpents while Canterlot was cut off from its primary stone quarry, it's quite likely that this room had to be sealed with inferior construction materials like rubble and debris. If we can break a chain and find the original door's location, we can probably buck it down… But then after that we’d probably be digging our way out. I suggest starting from half way up the entryway stairs.”

“If you still have the temples of my glasses, you should start trying to pick your locks with them,” suggested Totality.

“It’s the mare next to me that still has her horn,” said Hazy. “How long till she’s awake?”

“It took Totality about forty minutes to wake up,” answered Gamma.

“How do you even know that?” asked Totality.

“I counted the seconds.”

“Aww…”

Things were still bad, but the worst thing was not being able to hug Gamma.

Totality stood in the shower, staring vacantly into the drain as her roommate’s blood washed down it. Luck was with them and the intact unicorn, who they all knew now as Golden Grace, knew how to teleport and bussed all twelve of them out of the catacombs to the surface. It was almost two in the morning when they all got out and it wasn’t really clear what was to be done after escaping a horrifying episode that no pony noticed at a time when they were also all asleep.

Moondancer encouraged everypony to go to the academy infirmary. The three students who cut themselves got stitches and antiseptic potions. Totality was eager to leave in order to secure the grimoire, strangely at the behest of Moondancer who took her aside. She found the book still in her room, rehidden by Blue in the same place. Unfortunately, she didn’t clean up the broken flask.

Surreal, thought Totality. The most disturbing thing to her wasn't what happened in the catacombs, it was the fact that she’d been sleeping in the same room for months with the pony that did this.

Totality dressed her stitches with bandages and laid down in bed. This is batshit insane, she thought. How does something like this happen and then here I am going to bed alone in my homicidal roommate’s room who just exploded herself on me. Do we just… go to school tomorrow? Do we get crisis counseling or something? She was sure that in the morning it would be a different game. They’d have to talk to the police at some point. The four of them were the only real witnesses to what happened.

Suddenly she heard a knock at the door. Her body tensed. Shit, that couldn’t really be them, could it? It’s almost four in the morning. She slid out of her bunk and approached the door. She pawed at the lever and pulled it open to see none other than Hazy Sheen standing there. "Ugh," Totality grunted in disgust before immediately shutting the door again.

"Wait, Totality," she called through the door. "You weren’t sleeping, were you? I just want to talk."

Totality growled back at her. "For the last six years you've never just wanted to talk. If you’re talking to me, you’re either doing it to hurt me or doing reconnaissance to get ready to hurt me. So what is it that you're here to do to me? In just the last week, you intentionally fucked my old boyfriend, almost got my new one killed, and almost got me killed after attempting to get me expelled from the academy and blacklisted from my field of study forever."

Hazy put her muzzle to the door. “I know and all those things are really… terrible. I’m sorry. I know that’s like taping a cotton ball to a gushing leg stump, but I don’t know what else to say. Almost dying put a lot of things in perspective for me. I don’t want my identity or legacy to be the pony that tormented you forever.”

The latch clicked and Totality slowly opened the door again. When she looked into Hazy’s eyes, she saw something that she never remembered seeing in them before: humility. What a monumental backfiring of her actions, thought Totality. She’d been abducted and chained in that abysmal place for days. Her blood had undoubtedly been harvested by Blue to help make the seals, and all the while she believed she was going to die. It irked Totality that she couldn’t just believe without reservation that she didn’t deserve such an unspeakable ordeal.

“When you saved everypony, you didn’t even hesitate to include me, and I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Totality shook her head. “As much as I’d love for you to believe that I’m some kind of saint, the reality is that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t exclude you from the rescue without it hurting somepony else. But even in a different scenario, I’d still like to think that’s something I’d never do even to you even after learning what I did.”

Hazy nodded and swallowed. “I want you to have this.” She held a first place blue ribbon up in front of her.

“What the… hell?” breathed Totality, squinting curiously at the article without her glasses.

“It’s the science research paper award from middle school,” explained Hazy.

Totality laughed weakly as she took the ribbon clumsily. “I don’t know which is weirder: that you still have this, or that you brought it to college.”

It was never really about the ribbon, but it was impossible to ignore the cheapness of the symbol of where their feud had started. It really drove home the feeling of how disproportionate and stupid it all was.

“I liked the little bit of attention that stealing your paper got me, but the award never meant anything to me because I didn’t earn it. After you retaliated against me, I started to see it more as a trophy symbolizing victory over you. Now I can’t look at it like that anymore. It’s meaningless again. The only way I can give it meaning is to finally give it to the pony that actually earned it.”

Totality wiped a tear from her eye. “Thanks,” she whispered. “I’ve wanted to stop for so long now but I couldn’t. I couldn’t let you win. I guess if you're serious about this, then I should apologize too… and thank you."

Hazy's eyes bulged in shock. "Thank me? For what?"

"Just one thing. Sabotaging my relationship with Comet."

"Are you serious?"

"Yes. Even though it was out of malice and devastating to my self esteem, in the end, you actually did me a favor. I don’t want to waste my time with somepony that was eventually just going to do that to me anyway. And if it hadn't happened when it did, I might never have met Gamma."

"You've only known him a week, though," posed Hazy.

"I know,” she nodded. “But it was a hell of a week, the kind that tells you exactly who a pony is inside.”

“I see,” Hazy’s eyes went to the floor in thought. “I know a lot of damage has been done, but we still have three years left here and that’s a lot of time to start over.”

Totality nodded in agreement. If we’re lucky enough to be allowed to continue here, she thought. “I hope we’re not just both in shock from what happened and have no Idea what we’re saying right now.”

Hazy laughed. “I don’t think so.” Then she lowered her voice. “But just so we're all on the same page about that, if anypony asks… that was Blue’s book, right?”

“Eeyup,” smirked Totality.