Twilight and Spike Hide a Body

by GaPJaxie

Rating: everyone
Tags: Twilight Sparkle, Dark, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Spike, Comedy
Length: 5643

The real reason Twilight and Moondancer had a sudden falling out.

The real reason Twilight and Moondancer had a sudden falling out.

Written for Telly Vision for Jinglemas 2021

It now has an audio reading!

Published 2021-12-24 05:10:04 UTC
Last updated 2021-12-24 05:10:04 UTC

Chapter 1

Picture a city street.

It is in the bad part of Canterlot, near the quarry, near the mountain core, where businesses and government alike stick unsightly buildings so that they will not spoil the city skyline. In darker ages past, it was where cruel unicorns stuck “unsightly” ponies, and though such evil practices have ended, a pall still hangs about the place. The street stones are dark, the walks dirty. Buildings, lit from behind by harsh industrial arc lamps, form sinister outlines. Smokestacks become leafless trees, cranes great limbs stretching into the sky.

It is night, not quite 4 AM. The harsh industrial lights are bright enough to blot out the stars, but somehow not bright enough to illuminate the street fully. The sky appears wholly dark, the street full of long shadows. The previous night was Hearth’s Warming Eve. Now it is Hearth’s Warming Day, by a technicality.

Attempts have been made to spruce up the street, but they have all come to naught. Snow that should elicit feelings of winter joy rests heavy on factory roofs and forms a disgusting black slush around the storm drains. Signs by the street warn of the dangers of black ice. Garlands have been hung on fences and walls and doors, but they seem tired. Many are plastic, and worn, used year after year in a manner joyless and mechanical.

No pony hooves crunch the snow. The machines are still. Snowflakes fall, not in clumps but alone. They scattered, light, dancing as they descend. The air is silent.

At one end of the street, there is a bus stop, little more than a shed roof thrown over a bench. It has two walls, both aluminum slats, supporting a roof of the same material. Open on two sides, it offers no protection from the cold or wind, and only marginal protection from the snow. The bench is at least a place to sit, though its underside is festooned by years of abandoned gum.

There are two figures sitting on that bench, waiting for a bus.

Hear snow crunching under hooves, hear wheels turning. The bus approaches, for its 4 AM stop. It is not a large vehicle, having room for only ten riders, leaving it small enough to be pulled by a single stout earth pony. It is not the largest vehicle in the city’s fleet, but demand for bus service at such a point was anticipated to be low.

The bus driver’s name is Wild Road, and he is near the end of his shift. It hasn’t been a bad night. His last four stops had no passengers, giving him plenty of time to wander around the city with his own thoughts. His shift is almost over, and he anticipates being home in time to see his children enjoy their presents. He only has to complete this last leg of this route.

He comes to a careful stop before the little bus station. Both waiting figures get up.

One is a purple unicorn mare, wearing black necromancer’s robes and a Santa hat. She has a mask under her arm made from a pony’s skull. The other is some sort of green lizard creature with a Santa hat on its head and a toolbox under its arms nearly as large as it is.

They are both covered in blood. This is something Wild Road notices right away. When he looks more closely, he can also see the bloody hoofprints in the snow, stretching around the block.

“Excuse me, sir” says the mare, softly. “This bus stops at Canterlot Palace, right?”

“Um.” He hesitates. “Yes?”

“Thank you.” They both get on, and for lack of knowing what else to do, Wild Road starts off on his route.

The bus is small. Small enough that Wild Road can hear the passenger’s conversations inside. His ears swivel back as the two start to talk. The lizard speaks first: “I did not see that coming.”

“Yeah,” the mare agrees. Her voice is tired, “that escalated quickly. I can’t wait to get back home and go to bed.”

“We still need to mop up the blood before the princess’s visit in the morning,” the lizard says, which Wild Road felt raised the profile of the conversation considerably. “And we both need to shower and stuff.”

“Oh yeah.” The mare groans. “We’re not sleeping tonight, are we?”

“I don’t think so. Oh, and you need to get rid of that mask too.”

“You can’t just burn it to ash?” the mare asks, and both of them laugh. Some inside joke.

“We’ll work something out,” the lizard says. “I still don’t understand what happened though. Like, necromancy, obviously, but I thought… you know. That was a bit more involved. She was just walking around like everything was fine.”

“Well, yeah, of course she was. Why wouldn’t…” The mare pauses and Wild Road hears a sudden intake of breath. “Wait, did you think I actually killed Moondancer?”

The lizard’s voice takes a turn for the incredulous. “You didn’t kill Moondancer?”

“Oh my gosh.” And in her voice, outrage, surprise, a touch of alarm. “You thought I killed Moondancer and needed you to help me get rid of her body and you were just okay with it?”

“I wasn’t okay with it.” The lizard’s tone turns aggrieved. “But you’re my sister. I look out for you no matter what. And seriously, you didn’t kill Moondancer?”

“No, I didn’t kill Moondancer!” The mare bellows.

“Then who did?”

“Nopony!”

Wild Road feels a puff of heat behind him as the lizard lets out a burst of fire. “Then whose body did we just get rid of?”

“Wait, should we be having this conversation where ponies could hear us?”

Silence comes over the bus, and without turning around, Wild Road knows both lizard and mare are staring at him.

A single bead of sweat runs down his forehead.

Earlier that evening, in a little wizard’s tower on the grounds of Canterlot Palace, Spike was sitting down to enjoy Hearth’s Warming Eve.

He had been exceptionally diligent about his chores. The tower was clean, Twilight’s books were organized, the kitchen was spotless, and several days worth of meals were nearly packed away into the icebox. A warm fire blazed in the hearth, and an evergreen tree covered in tinsel and lights rested in one corner of the room, beneath it a vast collection of colorfully wrapped presents.

Every year, Twilight got him something practical, like educational books or scale polish or a guide to dealing with ponies with major anxiety disorders. While he loved her very much and appreciated the intention, they weren’t exactly gifts that filled him with joy.

Cadence’s gifts though, were another matter. Each Hearth’s Warming, she sent Spike exactly one gift, with a label that read, “Open Early.” It was always something special; something she knew he’d appreciate. This year, it was a special edition of Power Ponies, one of the one’s Twilight would never buy for him because they were collector’s items and, to quote, “I’m not paying 75 bits for a comic book whose cover clearly states the manufacturer recommended retail price is a quarter.”

344, Return of the Silver Scion. He could spend the whole evening reading it, and in the morning, wake up to some warm and wholesome family time with Twilight. It made for a good holiday.

Carefully, like a mother bird with her egg, Spike removed the comic from its envelope. The cover had not a single crease, the pages not a mark out of place. He inhaled deep, smelling fresh ink and fresh paper alike, and it was with an air of supreme relaxation that he turned to the first page.

“Gadzooks!” said Mistress Mare-velous, in her secret underground lair, “the apple-puter has detected something amiss.” It was high-art.

“Hey, Spike?” Twilight called from upstairs. “Could I ask you for a favor real quick? I need you to um, use your dragon fire to um. Incinerate some trash. Laboratory trash. Oh, uh. But it’s very magical. So uh… so magic. If you look at it it’ll freeze your eyes solid. So I need you to wear a blindfold. And I’ll just point your head in the right direction and tell you where to burn. Okay?”

“Quickly, to the Mare-velous Mobile!” With a single leap, she crossed across the cave to her giant horseshoe-shaped vehicle, strapping herself into the harness in the next panel. Spike never understood why she pulled her own car when she had a butler, though he supposed it had something to do with her being an earth pony and her butler being an aged unicorn.

“Spike?” Twilight called again. “Um, could you come up now, please?”

With a heavy sigh, Spike shut his comic book and put it on the table in front of him. He sat back in his chair, still not getting up. “What is it?”

“I need you to help me burn something.”

“I heard you the first time, I meant, what is it you need me to help you burn?”

After a pause, Twilight said: “Magic stuff.”

“Exactly what magic stuff? Describe the object in question.”

“Um.” Still at the top of the stairs, Twilight had to call down through the library tower. Her voice echoed. “It’s uh… otherworldly. So otherworldly in fact that merely describing it to a mortal would drive you insane. Non-euclidean stuff, you know? Tentacles. Extra dimensions. Um. Cults, all that.”

“Well, how big is it? My dragon fire isn’t that powerful yet. There’s limits to how much stuff I can burn at once.”

“Well it’s uh…” Twilight cleared her throat. “You know, it’s about the size of a pony I’d say. About that size.”

“Okay. And what is it made of? Is it made of something that burns easily, like paper?”

“Mostly made of meat.”

Spike drew in a deep breath. He stretched out and looked up at the ceiling, shutting his eyes. He stayed that way for a few long moments, focusing on his breathing, on slowing his heart rate. He pictured the comic in front of him and tried to remember that it would still be there in the morning.

“Spike?”

“She does this every year,” he mumbled to himself.

Still earlier that evening, while Spike was yet busy in the kitchen, Twilight and Moondancer were up in her laboratory, experimenting with a new spell they’d discovered in Nimble Force’s Non-Necromantic Magical Practices of the East Orlovian Territories, from 255 to 267 CE. Entitled “Casual Replication,” it allowed for the quick and easy duplication of objects the caster could see.

While it took a bit of getting used to, both of them were getting the hang of it quite readily. Twilight focused on a laboratory beaker and made it into two, then four, then eight. Moondancer eyed a copy of her favorite book, and then had another to give away. They were both delighted, though they did notice the copies were not entirely without flaws.

“The hinges are fused,” Moondancer observed. She’d made a copy of a wooden box with iron hinges, and while from the outside it appeared perfect, it would not open.

“Yeah, and look at this fork.” Twilight held up a silver fork, whose tines were bent badly out of shape.

“Maybe we’re doing the incantation wrong?” Moondancer suggested, looking back to the book. “Kabar is a tricky language.”

“No, I don’t think it’s that.” Twilight frowned. “The errors aren’t consistent. The book you duplicated was legible, and other than a few typos was a nearly perfect copy. The hinges look right, but they’re fused together. And the fork looks mangled.”

“It’s only an N=7 study so far,” Moondancer rolled her eyes. “Your observations are not statistically significant.”

“Kiss my bayesian priors,” Twilight said, lashing her tail behind her standing tall like the proud statistical mare she was. “Silver is denser than iron, which is denser than paper or glass. The severity of the errors correlates with the density of the material being duplicated.”

“Speculation,” Moondancer scoffed. “You always do this. Wild guesses are not a substitute for theories.”

“What was that?” Twilight asked leaning over and perking up her ears. “Sorry, I think you told me something, but I can’t draw any conclusions from an N=1 study. Better say that twenty-nine more times so I can be 95% confident you said it.”

“Yeah?” It’s a dangerous thing when two unicorns face each other, horns alight and heads full of math. “Well I have a four-year longitudinal study that says you’re not as smart as you think you are, and I challenge you to prove this baseless assertion!”

“Fine!” Twilight let out a snort and scratched her hoof on the floor. With her telekinesis, she produced four coins from the table: a copper bit, a silver bit, a gold bit, and a wooden bit she got for being a very good young mare at the orthodontist and only biting a little bit.

“Four coins, approximately the same volume,” she waved them in Moondancer’s face, “detailed etchings on each one so even small replication errors will be obvious. I’ll duplicate all four, and I’d bet the wooden coin against the gold that the denser the material the worse the replication errors.”

“First,” Moondancer said, with a longsuffering sigh, “you’re proposing to measure a delta, so that would still only be one data point. Second, ‘approximately’ the same volume is not the same as actually the same, so way to control your independent variables there. And third, you can’t run that experiment anyway, because using magic to replicate money is super-illegal. That’s counterfeiting.”

“Oh come on!” Twilight snorted. “You’re just afraid you’re wrong.”

“Look it up. It’s a felony.”

“Yeah, to replicate money so you can spend it. We’re just going to throw the copies away. I am sure the law was not intended with this scenario in mind.”

“Well go ahead then,” Moondancer said, learning forward with a smirk, her voice sing-song. “But if you do, I’ll totally write Celestia saying her favorite student in the world is a criminal mastermind.”

“You snitch!”

“I’ll do it,” Moondancer couldn’t help but giggle.

Twilight looked from her friend to the coins, back to her friend, and finally declared: “You’re bluffing.” Her horn shone, there was a crackle of magical energy, and where once there were four coins, there were instead eight.

Each was a perfect copy of its counterpart, with no discernable errors.

“Oh, what’s that? What’s that?” Moondancer slapped a hoof to her cheek, feigning a gasp. “Oh, are you wrong?”

Twilight mumbled something, and Moondancer took no mercy. “I have a prior that your methods are nonsense. Do you think I should update it in light of this data point?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Twilight let out a heavy sigh, slumping with her whole body. “Do you mind if we call it here for the night? I should spend some time with Spike.”

“Sure.” Moondancer smiled. “You’re not actually upset though, right?”

“No, of course not.” Twilight shrugged. “You were right, I was wrong.”

“Good.” Moondancer said. “Because I also wasn’t bluffing about writing Celestia.”

“Wait, what?” Twilight’s head shot up, just in time to see Moondancer fleeing down the tower’s interior steps. She gave chase, bolting after her friend with a cry of, “Don’t you dare!”

“I’ve already got the scroll out.” And she did have a scroll floating in front of her. “I left your present under the tree. Happy Hearth’s Warming.”

“Moondancer!” Twilight caught up just in time for Moondancer to dart out into the night, her hooves crunching on the snow. “Don’t you dare.”

“It’s a felony,” Moondancer called back, laughing, “I’m going to expose your criminal enterprise to the princess, just you wait.”

Finding this joke considerably less funny than the previous, Twilight rushed back up the tower steps to the laboratory, whose window offered a commanding view of the palace grounds. From there, she could watch Moondancer trot through the snow on her way to the palace gates, past the topiary statues, past the guards, past the palace outbuildings.

She had a scroll in front of her. She was writing as she trotted. Twilight trusted Moondancer, but she had a scroll in front of her and was writing as she trotted. How would it look if Twilight got dressed down in front of the royal court? If she got put on trial? Would the princess abandon her, would her family disown her?

She was too cute and magical to be a felon.

And so she thought, Moondancer was probably bluffing. All she needed to do was confirm that Moondancer was bluffing, and she could rest easy. Then she could relax. And so she focused her gaze on Moondancer’s scroll in the distance and summoned the spell they had spent that very evening practicing, confident that a legible copy of Moondancer’s writing would prove the whole affair a harmless joke.

She missed.

In one sense, Twilight was very lucky. Testing an unproven spell on any living creature, much less a pony, was a major violation of magical ethics. It would have been so easy for Moondancer to be hurt, but nothing of the sort transpired. The spell’s effect on her was so subtle, she didn’t even notice when it struck her on the rump.

But there was another sense in which Twilight was, perhaps, less lucky.

That being the sense in which a perfect copy of Moondancer’s body appeared in her laboratory, and promptly collapsed on top of her.

The copy was entirely inanimate, having no more life in it than a stone, but it was as warm as a living pony, and in its collapsing motions momentarily moved like a zombie. One can hardly blame Twilight for leaping to conclusions, thinking she’d created some unholy abomination.

She yelped and, reflexively, shoved the thing off her with all her magical might.

Moondancer’s simulacra flew across the room, carried on a ballistic arc that ended with its head striking the corner of a table.

Spike took a candy cane off the wall decorations and broke off the curved top, leaving him with a straight peppermint stick. He lit the fractured end on fire with a puff of his dragon fire, and took a long draw off the resulting peppermint cigarette.

It was going to be a long night.

She was on her side, crumpled up next to a table, her head resting against one table leg. Several items of laboratory equipment lay broken on the tabletop, and shattered glass littered the floor. A blood splatter centered on the table’s corner made it clear where Moondancer had struck the thing. A streak of blood ran down the leg against which she rested, and a crimson pool was spreading beneath her.

“It’s not what it looks like,” Twilight said, voice quick, stammering as she spoke. “It-it was an accident. I didn’t mean to… I mean. I didn’t kill Moondancer. We were just…”

“Better I don’t know the details.” Spike knelt beside the body, and though it was mostly a formality, he held two fingers to her neck to check for a pulse. The body was already getting cool. “We need to get rid of this thing. Fast.”

“Yeah! Yeah. Yeah,” Twilight said, with an anxious little titter. Like a bird. “So if you could just uh… burn it into ashes with your dragon fire. That would be great.”

But Spike shook his head. “At my age, dragon fire isn’t hot enough to reduce pony bone to ashes. Besides, burning something this big would take all night. We might not have that much time.”

“Why…” Twilight looked around, as though there was another pony in the room with them. “Why would we not have that much time?”

Spike gestured at the body on the ground. “Moondancer came and went by the usual route, right? Palace gates?”

“Yeah.”

“So the palace guards saw her.” He tapped his candy cane on the edge of the table, knocking away the old ashes. “Did the guards see anything suspicious happen? Something that might make Moondancer particularly memorable? Was she practicing magic, were you having an argument?”

“She threatened to expose my criminal empire to Princess Celestia.” Twilight held a hoof to her chest. “Wow. Okay. Wow. I now realize how that probably sounds out of context.”

Spike raised an eyebrow. “...or in context?”

“Oh no. Oh no.” Twilight’s breath came in quick, short gasps, and she pressed her hoof so hard into her chest it was as if she was trying to clutch her own heart. “I can’t explain this to Princess Celestia. I violated magical ethics, Spike. I violated the code of magical ethics!”

“Uh…” Spike drew out the word, and looked at the dead body on the floor. “I would say you violated several ethical codes on this one.”

“No no no.” She clutched her mane, tugging on the threads. Her eyes unfocused, and she stared at the floor as she started to hyperventilate. “I can’t get in trouble for this. I can’t. I can’t. It would be the end of my studies. Princess Celestia would send me away. It was an accident. I mean, not an accident, I cast the spell on purpose. But I didn’t know this would happen!”

“Hey!” Spike snapped his fingers in front of Twilight. “Snap out of it. You’ll be fine, Twilight. You’ll be fine. But I need you to keep it together. Okay? I’m going to get you out of this.”

“How are you going to get me out of this one?” She wailed, grasping her face with both forehooves. “You just said your dragon fire can’t get rid of a body.”

“Well, my dragon fire can’t, but between you and me…” He leaned in close. “I listen to a lot of murder podcasts.”

Twilight paused, her brow momentarily furrowing. Though her tone remained distressed, she had the self-possession to ask: “What’s a podcast?”

“It’s this thing where they mail you a new record every week, and that record has stories on it.”

“And…” She paused. “There are podcasts about murders?”

“As far as I can tell, most podcasts are about murders.” Spike buffed his claws on his scales. “Now come on, we need to get this body wrapped up in a carpet.”

“I don’t think we have a carpet that’s big enough.”

Spike considered that, casting his gaze over their little wizard’s tower: its carpets, its bookshelves, its modest kitchen. He saw the tree, the gifts, the utility closet, and the banners on the walls. Each he evaluated for its application to their dark purpose.

“I’m going to go open my Hearth's Warming gifts early,” he declared, trotting down the stairs.

“Is this really the time to be opening gifts?” Twilight followed him as he left, trotting down the stairs, towards the tree, towards the colorful boxes beneath it. “Spike. Spike! This is serious.”

“Relax,” Spike said. “Dad checked with me before he bought gifts this year. I know exactly what he’s getting me.”

Spike grabbed one of the gifts under the tree, in a big box covered in green wrapping paper. Carefully, he cut the paper away and revealed the box beneath, and removing that box’s lid revealed its contents in turn.

It was a toolbox, and from within that toolbox, Spike produced a hacksaw.

“I need you to open your gifts too,” Spike said. “And save the boxes.”

Twilight pulled a cart through the Canterlot downtown. She was dressed in a friendly red coat with white lining, and wore a hat like she was Santa Hooves herself. Spike rode on her back, dressed as her elf assistant with a little green shirt and a festive hat to call his own.

Their wagon was full of colorfully wrapped presents, bright boxes with multi-hued paper and little bows on top.

“I’m never not going to see that when I close my eyes.” Twilight mumbled. “Why is bone so hard?”

“Trot faster. The ravens are catching up.”

Their destination was a little club in the Canterlot downtown, a place with pounding lights and incessant smoke machines, where ponies drank hard, did drugs, and wore faux-leather and spikes. The two pulled their cart into the side alley, where Spike knocked on an unlabeled door and said he was here to see, “Shady Joe.”

“How do you know this pony?” Twilight asked, while they waited.

“Podcast.”

“I think I want to listen to these podcasts. I’m not sure they’re a good influence on you.”

“You’re not my mother,” Spike scoffed.

“I kind of am. I hatched you.”

“Fine, but if you assert your authority as my parent, then every time we meet somepony new, I’m introducing you as Twilight Sparkle, Teen Mother.”

A silence hung between them. Spike felt that was a sign he’d established boundaries.

Eventually, the door opened and a pony showed them into a smokey back room. There, a stallion covered in tattoos greeted Spike by name and offered him a candy cane to smoke. Twilight declined one of her own. “So, what can I do you for?”

“I’ve got this carpet,” Spike said. “And I just hate it. It’s ugly, you know? I need to get rid of it. I’m looking for a place I can offload a carpet.”

“It’s not a carpet though,” Twilight frowned. “It’s a bunch of boxes.”

“You know,” the shady pony shrugged. “Dragon says it’s a carpet. I trust him, it’s a carpet.”

“But it’s not a carpet,” Twilight insisted. “It’s a bunch of boxes full of bits of a mare after we sawed up a corpse, and we need a way to get rid of the evidence before the authorities find out and think we did a murder because she threatened to reveal my criminal empire."

Silence came over the space.

“Wow,” said the stallion with the tattoos, sitting up. “That is really rude.”

“I know!” Spike threw up his hands. “Not cool, Twilight.”

“I’m just trying to communicate clearly.”

“You’re violating the implicit social norms of this space is what you’re doing,” the stallion insisted. “There is a clear code of behavior that ties the criminal underworld together, and you, young mare, just broke it in so many ways. Would you walk up to a stranger and share intimate details about how your love life is going? No. So don’t walk up to me and share intimate details about how your professional life is going.”

“I don’t have a love life, okay?” Twilight fumed, crossing her hooves.

“I’m sure you have some personal details about your life that other ponies don’t want to know.”

“She’s a teen mom,” Spike cut in.

“Spike!” she bellowed, throwing her hooves into the air, her face a brilliant red. “I am not a teen mom!”

“Well,” said the stallion, his patience running thin, “be that as it may, you are a murderer, so let’s focus up.”

But Twilight, red in the face, wasn’t hearing it. Emotional, strained to her limits, she bellowed. “I am not a murderer either! This is all a big misunderstanding. I am a perfectly innocent pony who just happens to have chopped up the body of a mare and put it in two dozen different gift boxes.”

Silence hung over the room. Twilight’s horn glowed a bright purple, and her breath came in deep, angry gasps. She locked both eyes on the stallion in front of her, her look was smoldering, focused, intense.

He cleared his throat. “I believe you. Yeah.” A thug in the back of the room agreed, “Yeah, no, that happens all the time.”

“Good!” Twilight put down the knife that hadn’t realized she’d picked up. Telekinesis can be like that. Ponies pick up things without thinking about it. “So how do we do this?”

“Well, seeing as how I owe Spike a favor,” the stallion shrugged. “You’ve got it easy. The night mortician at the city morgue is on the take. His name is Under Mine, and he sells bodies to necromancers all the time. I’ll give you some robes, all you have to do is knock, make introductions, pass him a little bribe under the table. He’ll burn up your carpet in the morgue furnace. You still got the stuff?”

“Yeah, I got the stuff,” Spike said.

“Cool. He needs stuff.”

Twilight nickered. “I understand the importance of courtesy but these social conventions really make it difficult to understand what you two are hinting at.”

“Whatever,” the stallion said. “Here’s your robes. Get out.”

Kicked back out into the alley with one introduction and one set of black robes, the two were ready to go on their way. So focused were they on what came next, that it never occurred to them to count the number of boxes left inside their cart.

Up the street, a mischievous little unicorn foal ran up to his friends, a box floating beside him. “I nicked it,” he declared. “Let’s see what I got.”

That Hearth’s Warming, that little foal got four years of therapy.

It was a long walk to the bad part of town, where the city morgue rested between two dirty factories. By the end of it, Twilight was soaked with sweat from pulling the cart, and the towel Spike had thrown on the cart bed was soaked through with red.

They knocked on the back door, still in their cheerful red holiday attire, and told the guard they had gifts for Under Mine. He appeared, suspicious, and Twilight slipped on her black robes with the mask made from a pony skull.

“Oh,” he said, “sorry, I didn’t recognize you without the mask.”

“Whatever,” Twilight sighed. “Can we get this over with? This cart and everything in it needs to be incinerated, pronto. I had uh… an experiment that went bad.”

“Sure. Come on in,” the mortician said. “I’m dealing with another customer at the moment but I can be with you momentarily.”

And so, Twilight, Spike, and their cart dripping blood were all left in a waiting room with twelve other ponies in black robes and skull masks. Most of them sat quietly. One was flipping through a magazine.

“Are we all working on Hearth’s Warming Eve?” one of them finally asked. Under the mask, it was a stallion’s voice.

“Yeah,” said another, a mare. “I’m really starting to think our profession doesn’t have a healthy work/unlife balance. Because, you’ve got the day job to keep up appearances, but then as soon as the sun goes down…”

“I know, right?” a third voice. “I’m always either in the office or out graverobbing. It’s so hard to find time for my family.”

“I don’t know how you do it. It’s hard enough caring for my vampire spawn without having to worry about foals too.”

“Can we all just sit quietly please?” Twilight asked. “I’m going to be honest, it’s been a rough evening. We’ve been all over town dealing with all these shady criminal types, my legs are tired from dragging this corpse around, and all my things smell like blood and viscera. I’m just so tired and want this to be over.”

There were a variety of reactions to that. Nearly all were sympathetic. One necromancer said, “I’ve been there.” Another said, “Yeah it’s the chores that get you.” A third said, “There are days it almost doesn’t seem worth it.”

But one figure had a different reaction, the pony in a skull mask sitting directly next to Twilight. The sound of Twilight’s voice had evidently seized their attention, and they turned to examine her in detail.

“Wait,” the masked figure said. She leaned around Twilight to look at the chair on her opposite side. “Spike? I didn’t even see you there.”

The voice was familiar.

“No.” Twilight said. “No. No no. This isn’t happening.”

“Oh, that’s amazing.” Moondancer removed her mask. “Surprise!”

Twilight stared. She gaped. Heedless, Moondancer went on. “This is awesome!” Her voice bubbled over with enthusiasm, and a brilliant smile split her face. Everything about her, from the pose of her body to her wagging tail portrayed her transcendent joy. “I had no idea we had this in common. I’ve felt so bad, so bad for years, because we share everything and I hate keeping secrets from you. Lying about where I was going…” She ground her hoof into her chest. “It screwed me up inside having to keep it from you. But now…”

She held up her hoof. “Dark arts buddies high-five!”

Twilight did not return her gesture.

“Dark arts buddies low-five?” Twilight continued to stare.

“Dark arts… study buddies?” Moondancer hesitantly tried. “You’re still wearing the mask, I don’t quite know how to interpret…”

“You want to buy a body?” Twilight asked, her tone dull. “It’s in the cart. I brought it here to get rid of it. Mint condition. Died this evening. It’s yours if you take it off my hooves and get rid of all the evidence.”

“Oh, uh. Sure,” Moondancer said, with a shrug. “That’s a good deal. Um. Is everything okay, Twilight?”

“Good night, Moondancer,” Twilight said, rising from her chair. “Come on Spike, let’s go.”

She found the bus station at the end of the road.

“Oh yeah,” Minuette said, looking between Twilight and Moondancer. All of Twilight’s old Canterlot crew were gathered around a table, part of her attempt to reconnect. “You two used to be so close. You were like two peas in a pod! Whatever happened?”

“Uh…”

Their eyes met across the table.

“Twilight didn’t go to my birthday party,” Moondancer blurted out.

Twilight agreed with her, and the rest was history.

Chapter 2

In her secret necromantic lair behind the Canterlot Starbucks, Moondancer opened the first of her gifts from the back of Twilight’s cart.

It contained the head.