The Alicorn Drinks the Milk

Chapters

Chapter 1: The Icon of Magic
Chapter 2: The Diluted Soul
Chapter 3: The Prisoner
Chapter 4: The Breathing Overseer
Chapter 5: The Reusable Soldier
Chapter 6: The Ghosts of the Lens
Chapter 7: The One who Escaped
Chapter 8: The Beautiful One
Chapter 9: The Hero
Chapter 10: The Milkdrinker

Chapter 1: The Icon of Magic

Author's Note

This story, it should be noted, was created in accordance with a request produced by Shadowpony300. He (or she) requested an anthro crossover with "War of the Worlds: Goliath" (an interesting animated dieselpunk film, available on Youtube) starring Spike as the hero and Fleur De'Lis as his girlfriend.

As it has been requested, so it shall be done.

Chapter 1: The Icon of Magic

The floor was polished, smooth. Permanent. Something like concrete, but dark, its dim matrix flecked with barely reflective fragments of black mica, perhaps added for aesthetic purposes or perhaps because of how few materials yet remained that could serve the purpose. The age of beautiful white marble grouted with shining gold had long since passed. Now was the age of dark, synthetic stone, forged in defiance of the fate that a world once called Equestria so vehemently demanded of it.

He walked through the center of the great hall. High above him, at the tops of the metal and dark-stone Gothic walls, sat windows. They were lined with stained glass depicting scenes of ancient times, their forms meant to be beautiful, but now their vibrant colors only served as a disturbing filter to the light arising from the sky outside. They cast the dim crimson of the sky in strange and distressing shades, cutting the light of the world’s long-dead sun into shards of light in parody of the angular pony form across the unyielding and silent concrete below.

The guards stood at either side, spears held at their sides in their mechanical hands. Their bodies were white, and once might have been beautiful and spotless, serving beacons of light to the world. They were the Royal Guard—but even now, the white paint had chipped in some places, or been burned away in others. They were clean, but their age was apparent.

The vast metallic bodies stood sentry, their heads protected by diamond-forged dome helmets, some of the occupants inside still with their faces intact. Walking quietly between the lines of them, some moved their large pony eyes to see him. Some beheld him in awe, and some had eyes lit with the most vicious of jealously at the sight of a being that did not require a helmet, at a being who still walked on his own strong legs. Most though, stared at nothing, their eyes blank and distant—and some stared intently at things that could not be seen, barely maintaining their composure in the face of some unseen horror derived from the stimulants constantly injected into their fading brains.

They bore the insignia, although they did not need to. In each of their chests, the Crystal was apparent, the violet glow of each one illuminating the shadows of the red-sun in disturbing shades. Even with this grafted to their very cores, they still wore the painted star in a field of violet. The symbol of the Icon of Magic.

This was, after all, her temple.

The dragon approached the terminus of the path, at the farthest sanctum of the grand cathedral. It was where the statue had been constructed, arising from the stone and crystal of what had millennia before been Ponyville and housed in a domed room three hundred meters high. Spike paused to stare upward at it, a form cast in an alloy that no longer had a name.

The form depicted was, likewise, of a creature that had no true name. It bore five horned heads and five pairs of wings, two of its clawed arms stretched outward, its claws open, and two more planted on its massive dais; two hooves legs trailed behind it. They eyes it bore had not been forged completely, and seemed blank and oddly alien—but the faces were recognizable, recalled from the most distant memories of any among the population.

Its name was the Alicorn, a beast with five heads, or rather a symbolic representation of it—and, as in all cases, the face that stared forward, to look down at worshipers, was the face of the Icon of Magic herself, the aspect of the Alicorn Incarnate. The only one which still spoke.

He approached, climbing the black stairs to the alter. Waiting at the top were two cylinders, black in color, but each with a slit in the front emanating light. They were approximately as tall as he was, and runes glowed with eibon blackness on their surface. Each bore a violet crystal, just as the guards did.

Something moved in one. He saw what looked like a faded eye stare out at him, but only for the briefest moment. He averted his eyes.

“Grand Seneschal Spike," said one, its voice disturbingly clear despite the mechanism by which the facsimile was produced.

Spike looked up from beneath his dark hood. His armor rustled as he stood tall.

“Moondancer,” he said to the cylinder that had addressed him. Then, to the other, “Trixie.”

The second cylinder gurgled slightly. Like a quiet sob from deep under something more viscous than water. “She has been expecting you," continued Moondancer. "Please enter.”

The two cylinders summoned magic, and a set of burning blue lines traced a rectangle through the air, outlining the gate they summoned. Spike stepped through and into the inner sanctuary.

The gap closed immediately behind him, and he felt the cold air rush toward him. He took a breath and nearly coughed. The atmosphere reeked of oxygen. It was survivable, even tolerable, but he had grown used to the atmosphere that now enveloped Equestria, his dragon lungs far more evolved for an atmosphere of sulfur and carbon dioxides.

And yet, despite the acrid taste of the burning gas, memories flooded back to him. Of times long passed when this is how all the world had smelled, and of his youth. Of his friends, and the adventures they had together. Of those he had loved so dearly. The glorious days when he and all other dragons were still ignorant of the narcotic effects of oxygen, blissfully unaware as the gas stunted his growth and clouded his mind and the minds of what few dragons had existed back then.

His lungs were those meant to breath ash and fire—and yet he had almost forgotten the smell of the air of the past world. He nearly wept, but contained himself and stepped forward into the darkness. Surely, by now, he knew his way.

He heard the sounds of the machines. Of the shuffling of the technicians. In a dim light and through the shadows of the wires and conduits, he saw a pair of them working. Approaching them, he recognized the pair, even with their faces replaced with steely respirator masks permanently grafted to the skinned muscle beneath. One was Dr. Horse, the other his assistant, Redheart. They were in the process of attending the lower half of a pale violet leg, its arteries and veins clamped and attached to an almost beautiful plume of clear tubes forcing synthetic blood into it and recovering it as it was again ejected by the pressure of some unseen mechanical heart. On occasion, the hoof would twitch, motivated by artificial nerves or the response to pain as they attended a spreading patch of necrosis, Dr. Horse carefully stacking the pieces of debrided purple flesh as Redheart applied staples with a device held in her thin robotic hands.

“Dr. Horse.”

The doctor turned. His face, though a blank mask, was still in the shape of a pony’s head. His body, though, was a machine of absolute precision, a purpose-built construct of magically and technologically animated synthetic sinew and gears. A device built specifically for the purpose of tending the Icon.

Spike eyed the open wound and the twitching muscle fibers within, and then the dish of skin fragments.

Dr. Horse noticed. “All fragments, no matter how small, are sacred. The process is slow. Painstaking. But necessary. To preserve her.”

“But it’s just the hoof.”

“True,” said Redheart, applying her row of staples to the already scarred and half-decayed limb, its tattered and overgrown hoof twitching with each blow, “but we can’t keep her alive unless the parts are alive. She’ll need it. Some day.”

Spike sighed. “And her condition?”

Dr. Horse paused. He set down his dish of skin near his scalpels and syringes. “Stable,” he lied. “For the time being. We are keeping the parts alive. That is all we can do. But more will be needed. And very soon.”

Spike nodded and passed them, leaving them to their work and the other technicians to theirs. Maintaining the system, and maintaining the parts that the slow decomposition had forced them to build new linkages to. The situation was indeed growing dire—but the sight was not new. Spike could not remember the last time it had bothered him. Perhaps the first time he had seen it, so long ago.

Instead, he continued onward. Toward the far more difficult sight to bear.

As his eyes adjusted, he was able to behold more of it. Of the room where the Alicorn resided, a residence that hummed with powerful magic and the clicking of so many machines. A flat surface, one carved not from concrete but from ancient crystal, formed into the shape of a great five-pointed star. Spike looked out over the vast distance and saw them: the tanks. Four of them. They were vast things of metal-frame construction, their walls made from filthy glass. He did not like the tanks, or to see what was in them, but he had seen the residents before. The undifferentiated, leprous masses of scabbed, lesion-ridden flesh, things of tentacles and teeth that could only sometimes be seen moving close to the glass of their containers before retreating into the inky blackness of the fluid that sustained them. Four containers of monstrous, distorted things: two white, one blue, and one pink.

Hoses lead from each tank, pumping liquid past intricate trails of powerful, ominous runes, directing both the magic and pale, barely glowing fluid derived from the tanks back into the pentagram and through processing systems that created more pure versions of both the acrid fluid and the magic that the tanks were designed to generate. These led to the final point on the pentagram, the most forward aspect. The aspect that faced outward: the Face of the Alicorn, the Icon of Magic, the Avatar of Harmony.

The machines converged on her—or, rather, what remained of her. Not in a tank, but suspended, even integrated into them. Spike approached, and he saw her. Her torso had been severed at the waist, the arteries and intestines linked to machines that forced life into the second-largest part of her remains. A torso that still breathed, air being forced through the tubes in her neck, even with her heart set aside in a specialized machine beside it. A torso filled with implanted ports, linking her directly to the iridescent, glowing fluid purified from the ichor filling the four tanks.

One hoof remained, desperately thin and pale, and her face was still distinctly intact, although stretched strangely and distorted from numerous scars where the necrosis had been extracted and the holes grafted or the skin pulled back together around the wounds. One eye had gone pail and collapsed, but the other still retained the ability to move, even if it was blind and milky white.

Linking the rear of this husk were hundreds of wires and cables, all color-coded and perfectly labeled. They led to her. To Twilight. To the nexus of the machine where her spine was suspended above herself, linked to yet more tubes of luminescent psuedo-blood as well as to the wires of the machine. At the top of this, linked by an artificial array of wires, sat her skull—or, rather, the rear part of it. The aspect that contained her brain. The front portion of the skull had been separated, retained to support her face in the rest of her four yards below.

The rear of the skull had been opened, and a pair of technicians re-inserted a portion of her brain that they had removed for cleaning. Her horn flickered. It was intact, as were her wings—each faded, featherless remnants supported from machines on either side of her disembodied spine, fed a supply of nutrients and oxygen to replace their once-vigorous connection to living flesh.

The clouded eye moved, and Twilight's severed face smiled.

“Spike,” she said, “you came.”

Her voice was barely a croak through dry, barely intact vocal cords, but reinforced through the machine that now made up the majority of her body.

He saluted. “Of course, Princess.”

A slight, weak laugh. “Please, Spike. I’m still me. You don't have to salute.” She paused. “Have you gotten taller?”

Spike smiled. “Not taller, but a little wider. Buff wide, not fat wide. I’ve been training with the other dragons in my spare time.”

“You mean lava-surfing with the other dragons.”

Spike blushed slightly, but he smiled. For the first time in a long time. “You’ve got me there. But one of these days, I’m actually going to get good at it.”

“I’m sure you will. I’d like to see that. I’m...blind right now, but that can be fixed. Obviously.” She paused again, taking a ragged breath that made the technicians obviously nervous. “It’s good to have friends, Spike. I’m glad.”

“I learned from the best.”

A figure stepped out from the shadows and into the dim light that had been activated to illuminate Twilight—a light that could only remain active for a short duration to avoid harming her. Light burned her these days.

The pink unicorn paused, smiling up at Spike, her eyes strangely yellowed and strangely sincere. “Luster,” said Spike, somewhat darkly.

Luster Dawn smiled. Her body, dressed in fine pink and white vestments, was a unique version, the only one of its kind ever constructed. Like all pony bodies, it stood on a pair of legs and bore a pair of hands, but unlike all others, hers was not mechanical. It had instead been stitched from the still-living flesh of the otherwise sacrificed pony bodies, forged into the New Form through advanced surgery. A body made of flesh was considered an extravagant luxury, worthy only for the Royal Steward of the Icon of Magic.

And yet, it was still a graft. The joint had been styled to resemble a thick necklace, but Spike understood what it was. He could see the glowing crystal mounted in the front, her link to the Alicorn. The connection that secured the link between her original head and the new body.

He was also aware of the cost of this body. That for it to exist was perpetual, unending agony for the pony grafted to it.

“Grand Seneschal,” she said, nodding. “Welcome home.”

Spike nodded. Luster continued to smile. The head had not aged. The heads never did. The Alicorn prevented that. But her smile seemed so very different from what it had once been so many centuries ago.

“I am sure you know why you are here.”

Spike let out another sigh. “It’s time, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry,” said Twilight, her voice low. “But it is.”

Spike nodded but could not bring himself to smile. “The target, then?”

Twilight paused. Her blind eye stared, seeming so distant.

“The target is 1358-theta-997-G.”

Spike’s eyes widened. “997-G? You can’t be serious, Twilight!”

“I no longer have the strength to open any more viable Doors, Spike. I’m sorry. It’s the only way.”

Spike took a step forward, causing Luster to jump back. “Twilight, I was there the last time! We were wiped out! Leveled! Good ponies died on that rock! Fleur died on that rock!”

“I know that, Spike. Luster?”

Luster dawn stepped forward, lighting her horn and projecting a hologram of data that Spike had never been taught to understand but instantly comprehended, even in the oxygen atmosphere. An image of something so small and so simple that had taken so much from them.

“We have performed substantial analysis,” explained Luster, “and concluded that the cause of our defeat was this. A form of precision biological weapon. The Germ. Based on samples we have analyses, we have reached the conclusion that it was created artificially and by magical means.” She paused. “By her.”

Spike’s jaw clenched. “The Heretic.”

“We have developed countermeasures,” assured Twilight. “It’s been over three hundred years. I’ve written the recommendations and protocols into the standard operating procedures. Well, Luster wrote them. But I helped.”

"I had it bound." Luster passed the text to Spike, who flipped through it. Their would surely be a briefing later, but he understood the crux of it. Mainly, that Milking technology had improved substantially in the intervening period.

He paused, reading through the recommendations, and Twilight waited until he was ready to speak. He looked up, his vibrant green eyes meeting her one remaining clouded one.

“Why?”

Twilight’s eye darkened, no longer able to meet Spike’s. “Spike, you know why—”

“No. Not that. I know that. Why her? Why would she do this to us? I lost—friends.”

“You lost Fleur.”

Spike nodded. “She killed Fleur, but she was my friend too, though. Our friend. And now--”

“She is still our friend, Spike. And she always will be.”

“No. Not anymore.” Spike shook his head, but stopped. He looked up at Twilight. “Why her?”

“She is a Heretic,” said Luster Dawn, as if that were an explanation. “It’s in the name—”

“That isn’t what he means,” said Twilight, patiently. Her eye faced Spike again. “Is it?”

“Why is she the only living pony that can survive without a direct connection to the Alicorn? Why her?”

Twilight let out a long, rasping sigh. “I have given that a great deal of thought. Thinking is really all I can do here, isn’t it? I can’t exactly go for a walk, now can I?” She laughed weakly and without even the slightest humor. “But I can think. It takes almost all my conclusion force to maintain the Alicorn, all my magic continuously. But I’ve sealed off a small part of my mind. That’s what you’re talking too right now, actually.”

“And?”

“And it stands to reason that if I am Equestria’s Savior, then there has to be an opposite. A balance. An equalizer. An Antichrist. I think it might just be her. And since I am all-powerful...maybe she is, too?”

Spike considered this. He was not sure he believed it. But, in truth, it hardly mattered. The Heretic had wrought destruction not by force of magic or power, but by engineering something so small and simple as a magically charged species of bacteria. Though apparently immortal, she may have been weak. Possibly.

“She will try to stop me again.”

“I know, Spike. And you need to know that you’re my only hope. I need the Milk. Equestria needs it. I’m sorry I have to ask—”

“Don’t be.” Spike saluted. “Your will be done, Twilight. If this is what it takes to help all my friends, then this is what must be done. It isn’t even a question.”

Twilight’s face smiled. “I’m glad, Spike. I’m so glad...”

Exiting the Temple, Spike paused on the steps, taking a deep breath of the burning atmosphere and feeling his strength returning—and yet he was still shaking. Like it was the first time all over again. He was not afraid. He understood what needed to be done. How routine and mundane it was. And yet it was never routine, and never mundane. It never had been, and it never would be. It was not fear that gave him pause, but insidious hate. Not for them, but for himself. Hate and a certain type of resigned sadness he had once thought to be noble.

He looked out over Equestria. High above, in the crimson skies were etched with black clouds of ash that rained not water but burning hairs of stone. Scarlet lightning flashed between them, igniting distant and low thunder that could scarcely be heard over the burning wind.

Before him lay a wasteland of new stone and piled ash, of rock and dark-red sand. From it arose the remnants of what were once cities that he had wandered in when the world was still so clean and fresh, before the cycle had progressed. Now all that remained were shards of unrecognizable rusted metal, concrete, and desiccated spines of wood.

Far in the distance, rocky crags had risen to the very reaches of the horizon, their towers rising high to where storms that would never again be restrained by Pegasi raged endlessly. Mountains lit by the dull orange of the lava seas that arose from the deep and fell from above, encroaching forward onto a world that had once been green.

In the distance, a dust storm was forming at ground level. Black, toxic dust and ash blew through the empty streets and remains of buildings. What ponies still dwelt there would retreat, and they would wait. As they had waited across the centuries, their eternal lives retained by the Alicorn even as their bodies were severed and what remained of them began to atrophy.

Looking out at this sight, Spike felt a distant longing. His heart told him that it was beautiful. The rising, igneous stone, the vast mountains and endless cliffs, the sight of burning lava and the rain of ash—it tugged at something primal within him, a distant longing from a time that had passed a million years before he wad hatched at Twilight's side. It was how the air smelled to him: a volcanic atmosphere toxic to the life that had once dominated this world, and so instinctively familiar to him.

And yet his mind drove him to profound sadness. To see the bright and happy world of his youth in this state of decay. And, worse, to know that the only hope of restoring it lay on him, the last Equestrian who retained any semblance of strength. Twilight’s last rock, and one of the last of her friends who still retained the capacity for speech and understanding.

He stepped to the edge, toward the ancient and crumbling staircase, but he stopped. A sound came through the wind. A sound of two pairs of wings descending from the fires above.

Two forms landed behind him, folding their leathery wings on their backs and standing tall. Spike wished he was in the mood to smile. To greet his friends. But this was not a time he wanted to see them. Not so soon after seeing his oldest friend of all and beholding what had become of her.

Still, he faced them. Two dragons. One of the pair was small, only as tall as he was, and only about a yard taller than when he had first met her. She, like him, belonged to what could best be described as the same race, a race descended from something far older than any dragon could recall. Their equivalent, or analogy, to unicorns. What Spike came to understand as wizards, their bodies not constrained in size by biology but by sheer will.

The other was far larger, standing nearly thirty feet in height, the average size of a young dragon barely having entered adulthood. While the smaller of the two wore clothing more similar to Spike’s, of metallic armor interlaced with rugged but beautiful textiles created from strange and previously unfathomable materials The taller of the two wore pure heavy armor, her body decorated in fine-wrought golden metal polished to dull, mottled matte and decorated with jewelry made of iron chains linked to carefully chosen bones and fangs alongside other trophies. The smaller did not wear such trophies because she did not require them. The only badge necessary for her was the staff she carried, adorned with a crystal equal in color and beauty to the sky above.

“Dragonlord,” said Spike, saluting and bowing to Ember. Then, facing the other. “Smolder.”

“Spike,” said Ember.

“Why are you here?”

Ember frowned. “I’m here to visit an old friend. Do you have a problem with that?”

“No. Of course not. She’s your friend too. But we just spoke, and she may be...tired.”

“She doesn’t need to speak. Or even listen. She just needs to know I’m still here.”

Spike’s eyes narrowed. “So what is this, a challenge?”

“That’s not what she meant and you know it,” snapped Smolder. “Spike, we’ve known her almost as long as you have. She was my teacher.”

“Our teacher. In a sense,” added Ember. She gestured to the stained hull of the Temple. “She brought friendship to the dragons in a time when we were still savages.”

“And we aren’t now?”

Ember chuckled. “Why wouldn’t we be? But you can’t argue that she didn’t change the course of dragon civilization in her short lifespan.” She paused. “I don’t know if we would be where we are today without her. And more than that, Smolder’s not wrong. She’s my friend. Our friend. And dragons don’t give up on their friends. Even when they’re...”

“They’re what?”

“Like this,” said Smolder, never breaking eye contact.

Spike sighed. He pushed back his hood and ran his claw through his spines. “I know. I know, I’m sorry. It’s just...”

“I know,” said Smolder.

Spike looked up at her. “You do, don’t you?”

She nodded. “I had five best friends. Only one was a pony. So only one survived.”

“Sandbar. Is he...okay?”

Smolder shook her head. “He lives alone. Far from anything. He sits on the shore, staring out at where the ocean used to be. I visit him. When I can. But he doesn’t speak anymore. He just...stares. And sometimes cries when he thinks I can’t see him.” She paused. “I think...he misses them too. I certainly do.”

Spike lowered his gaze. New sadness came to him, or rather, old sadness that it had become force of habit to push back. There had been so many friends. He remembered Thorax. But the Alicorn could only apply to ponies. Only ponies had survived. Ponies and dragons, by entirely different mechanisms.

“Spike,” said Ember, stepping forward toward him. “You know you don’t have to do this.”

“Don’t lecture me, Ember. Please. I’m really not in the mood.”

“I don’t care what mood you are or aren’t in. But you’re my friend too and you’re being an idiot. Look out at the world!” She gestured with her staff to the wasteland. Spike once again stared out, and felt as he did before—except now it was more difficult to hold back the tears.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” she said. “A perfect world. A utopia. A world of fire and rock, lava and smoke as far as the eye can see and as far as the wing can take us. Perfect...for dragons.” Spike looked back at her. She was beautiful, and he supposed he had always known that, but in the same way this world was. In a way he could never truly understand or force himself to believe.

Her expression, though, was not one of draconic arrogance, but one of grave concern.

“The cycle is progressing. Has progressed. The Age of Ponies is over. Now is the Age of Dragons. As it once was, before. You have the memories. We all do.”

“I know, Ember. I know...”

“Our numbers increase every day. Our numbers and our strength. Our magic, our intelligence. There is nothing green left on this world. Dragons are now the dominant civilization.”

“Do you think I don’t know that?!”

“You don’t need to yell,” snapped Smolder. “She’s just trying to help.”

“Is she? Do you think I haven’t noticed?! That I get stronger while every single one of my friends is dying? Or already DEAD?”

Smolder blinked. “We’re not dying, Spike.”

“You are a dragon,” snapped Ember. “You are one of us. You do not need to be alone. Not anymore.”

Spike turned away from her. “I am not alone.”

Her claw grabbed his pauldron, stopping him.

“Their age is ended,” she said, quietly, “the world has moved on. You’re prolonging the inevitable. What you’re doing, keeping her like this, them like this, it’s cruel. To them, and to you.”

Spike stood in silence for a moment. Then, through the weight of it all, he spoke.

“They’re my friends, Ember. I’m not going to give up on them. A dragon never does, do we? You said it yourself. I’m not going to give up on Twilight. Not when she needs me. I can’t. I just can’t.”

Ember released him. “I know.”

Spike looked back at her, and nodded to Smolder. Then he spread his wings and took flight into the burning atmosphere of a world that the dragons had not even bothered to name.

Chapter 2: The Diluted Soul

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Chapter 3: The Prisoner

He entered. The air was cool, or cooler, and so disturbingly still. Motes of dust passed through the directional light not of the dying sun, the toxic lining or the decaying moon, but from crystals charged with luminescent magic. He had created them from the ones Fleur had liked the most; the ones he had not eaten. Now they cast a pale blue light throughout his home.

It was not a cave. Not apparently. Rather, it was one of the few remaining structures built in pony style. Most like it had decayed, and most of the population dwelt in the tower-cities, the cyclopean fortresses built in in a world where there were no enemies left except the world itself. Spike had constructed his own home in a different place, in a half-buried and ancient bunker. One that would have decayed centuries ago had it not been reinforced with magic. Not pony magic, a forbidden and decadent luxury, but his own limitless supply.

He did not remove his armor or the black clothing he wore. There was no need to; to be covered in armor was second-nature for him at this point. He had grown accustomed to the heat of the world, and his clothing kept him warm in the icy places where ponies still dwelt.

Instead, he raised one of his claws and cast a spell, the dust instantly clearing from his garments and the thin tarnish layer of his armor fading to a brilliant gleam. The exact format of armor that was considered immature and unfashionable by dragons, who favored layers of oxide and grime. But to Spike, armor was meant to shine. The way it had when ponies had worn it. He had spent his life fantasizing of being a great knight, and now that he was the master of all Equestrian knights, he intended to keep up the image.

He paused at the shelves in his entryway. At the objects accumulated in his endless life. At a red gemstone, aged beyond measure, clasped in a golden chain; at a pair of twenty-sided dice with twenty-seven sides, a gift from Discord before he had departed from this world for the last time; feathers from Peewee, his descendents now forming flocks ten million strong across the world; beside it, Embers first helmet, on a shelf next to his own first suit of costume armor back when he had still been small enough to ride on a pony’s back. On Twilight’s back.

But what drew his attention were the pictures. Many of them faded, the color drained from them by an endless existence or the lines blurred by copying them generation after generation. Pictures of his friends. Of Twilight, when she was still young and whole, even before her wings; of Fluttershy, and Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Applejack and Rarity. Of the Cutie Mark Crusaders as children, when now one was a machine, one insane, and one dead and on the brink of soulless resurrection. A part-burned photograph Shining Armor and Cadence, and of Flurry Heart as she had grown into a beautiful young mare, and of Celestia and Luna, the other components that had been used to manufacture the Alicorn. There was a picture of Thorax, and one of Ember and Smolder in their oxygen-addled youth. And one picture that he could not bear to discard, but that he had pushed down so that she would not be looking back at him. A picture of him smiling and laughing beside her, the Heretic herself. The last known image of Starlight Glimmer.

Lost in the memories, his eyes drifted to a modern set of pictures. They were larger, fresher, and created by newer technology—and though happy, their images still bore the hallmarks of the world that back then was still far but already approaching so very quickly. When the death of Equestria had still been future-Spike’s problem.

In one, he stood beside her. A tall, thin pony, taller than even he was. Her head was narrow and beautiful, her neck, mane and horn all long and perfect, and the body that it had been grafted to assembled with exacting precision, its porcelain surface unblemished by the world that would come to be. A body so elegant and beautiful that her pink eyes did not show the horror of her forced existence. That picture had been taken only a few months after the transplant, and yet she looked so beautiful even then.

There were others. Of Spike, now the same height as her, lifting her mechanical body as she struck a pose. He recalled how light she had been, even with a body made of metal and ceramic, when once he had scarcely been able to lift her.

Then another. The mare implanted into a bulky battle-format body and Spike dressed in full uniform, standing at the base of her tripod mech. A picture taken by one of the younger ponies just before the last battle. Her last battle. When, three hundred years prior, the Germ had killed her before she had even known she was dead.

“I was so beautiful even then, wasn’t I?” she said, from behind him.

Spike turned slowly to face her. Fleur de Lis, the mare he had lived with since long before her death. Her container sat in the corner of the room, unable to move. A heavy cube, its dark surface inscribed with hideous runes that glowed with an uneasy violet light. At the center of its base, a crystal. Her link to the Alicorn, held in place by an ornate clasp and an array of tubes and conduits that fed into various places on the box, feeding magic to both the system of runes as well as the contents within. The only sound she made now was the low rushing of liquids being pumped into and out of the container, the mechanisms that kept it operational.

“You are still beautiful, Fleur.”

“No, Spike. No I am not. Not anymore.”

Spike approached her and placed his hand on the box, wincing from the pain as the cursed runes touched his flesh. Runes assembled by the one form of pony magic that a dragon could not bear to wield. And yet he dealt with the pain. It was trivial compared to what she had gone through.

“Please. Don’t touch it. It hurts you.”

“I don’t care.”

“But I do. I cannot bear to see you injured.”

Spike sighed and withdrew his hand. The burned flesh immediately regenerated. “I don’t care what you look like. You’re still here, aren’t you? And the box is nice.”

“I cannot move, Spike.”

“I can have the box fitted with a mechanical system--”

“Zat is not what I mean, Spike.”

Spike paused. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“You were visiting the Icon of Generosity again.”

Spike nodded. “Does that bother you?”

“No.” There was no hesitation in her mechanical voice. “I understand. I miss her too. She was a close friend. To a great many of us.”

“I spoke to Sweetie Belle.”

“Which one?”

“117.”

“Ah. I never much liked that one.”

“She said that someday Rarity will come back. And you. You still have a connection to the Alicorn. We can still bring you back. I just need more time.”

Fleur paused. The only sound from her was the gurgling of her pumps. “Do you truly believe that, Spike?”

“What I believe doesn’t matter. What do you believe?”

Fleur took a moment to answer. “I am dead, Spike. For three hundred years. I have resigned myself to zis fate. And zat is not an answer to my question.”

“No,” said Spike. “It isn’t.”

“Such sadness you still carry. For the last of us still so strong. When we had met, zis, I did not understand. I see now, it is necessary. The burden you must bear. Being alone, and never alone. Zat you allow me to remain here...”

“I want you here, Fleur. If you are willing to stay.”

“Of course, Spike. Of course. But I see your eyes, even zough ze disease has left me blind. When you see me. I do not want you to bear sadness, not for my sake.”

“If I had known, if I had pulled you out in time--”

“So zat I could have died in quarantine? We were exposed the moment we landed. Ze strain could not be stopped by our armor. Ze Heretic, she was a clever woman.”

“Is. She is still alive.”

Fleur paused. “Because of course she is.”

Spike took a breath. “I’ve been given another assignment. And it’s...it’s that one. 997-G.”

“I know zis. Which is why I have submitted a request so serve once more.”

Spike stiffened. “What? Fleur, no, you can’t! You can’t do that--”

“Just because I resemble furniture does not mean you have ze right to command zis, Grand Seneschal. This is my decision. Ze request has already been accepted, and a tripod prepared to be compatible with my...situation.”

“Fleur, you died on that rock--”

“Yes. This is truth. And death, she is a minor inconvenience. Many died zere, Spike. And I will not be whole again. Not until my war is finished.”

“Then what is it? Revenge? Fleur, you’re retired. You don’t have to fight, you don’t have to be involved in another war. Please. Please stay here, where you’re safe--”

“Why? My love, I cannot die twice. My once was inglorious indeed, murdered by betrayal of one I once trusted. Ais cannot go unremedied. I am a De’Lis. It will not stand. Nor can you stop me.”

Spike glared at her, but was then forced to smile. “No. You’re right. I guess I can’t, can I?”

A low mechanical chuckle escaped the box. “He finally sees reason, perhaps? Where is Ae famed dragon stubbornness I expected?”

“I was raised by ponies, wasn’t I? At this point I’m more pony than dragon. Even if I don’t get an epic robot body.” He flicked the corner of the box, causing the runes to fluctuate just slightly. “I have preparations to attend to, but I’ll be back.”

“Spike. Surely you are not planning to sleep in the foyer again?”

“You can’t come to bed. So I’ll come to you. Like I always do. I always sleep so better when you talk to me before I drift off.”

“And because I alone can wake you up on time, no doubt.”

Spike shrugged. “True. This is one is really important. I need everything to go perfectly.”

“On 997-G? Do not bring poor luck to yourself, my dear. Expect nothing to go well, let alone perfectly. This is why I shall be there, beside you in battle. Like we once were. To bring zis cycle to its end.”

Spike retained his smile, but with difficulty. “To bring it to its end. If that’s what you need, Fleur, I’ll do everything in my power to make it happen.”

“Do you promise?”

Smile nodded. “Of course I promise. No matter what happens this time, everything is going to be okay in the end, isn’t it? I won’t lose you again. I promise.”

He stared at the box and could not help but feel that Fleur De’Lis was smiling—and not help but wish he could see it just one more time.

Author's Note

Mortality, a reversible constraint, is of no meaningful consequence.

Chapter 4: The Breathing Overseer

When the preparations were made, the time had come. It was time for war.

Spike had lived a long, long time. By dragon standards, he was still a child, but in the lifetimes of ponies before the Alicorn had brought them universal immortality, he was ancient. In that short—and so verylong—lifetime, he had witnessed the birth and evolution of war in its entirety. From a peaceful, colorful civilization whose imagined conflict consisted of little more than charging and slapping one’s opponent to increasingly more detailed and more brutal technological systems, eventually culminating into a system of war driven by unspeakable methods with devastating efficiency. Then he had watched as war itself evolved beyond that point. Until it was no longer war anymore, exactly. To where the duty of a knight was little more than a repetitive industrial process.

The time had come to bring the Milk.

The facility did not exactly have a name. It was one of several monolithic industrial buildings that had not only survived but had grown from the ruins of Equestria around the Temple of the Alicorn. An enormous armored structure, a fort built with no intent of defense and only of attack, a leaning heap of metal plunged into the ground at an oblique angle like a broken fragment of rusted steel. It rose from the sand, defiant against the storms and the lightning that scarred its armored surface. On either end it was linked to the vast cables that distributed the Alicorn when saturation was no longer sufficient: wires hundreds of feet thick of thousands of metal strands and living myelin, fused and wrapped with chains of strange magic that pulsed with life. The life that sprung eternal, pulsing into every living pony, arising from the Alicorn and commanded by Twilight Sparkle herself as its avatar.

Spike knew the building, and knew it well. He had built it. Twilight had been so happy that he had done such a good job. Back then, she could still walk. The cables tethered her to the machines, and her frame was growing weaker, but she had been able to approach a balcony and look out at it with him. It was a surprisingly strong memory, and Spike treasured it, even knowing what this facility was meant to do.

None were present as he marched through its great halls. None except the Sleeping in their containment pods. Sarcophagi, in a sense, although they were not dead. Twilight thought of them as beds. Places where the heads of unicorns could rest, no longer in pain, their magic siphoned and directed by machines to power the Door that she had previously torn open at immense personal expense.

Liquid channels of floating runes linked the column-like machines, and through the thick, green glass, Spike saw their heads resting so peacefully, their sleep perhaps filled with dreams. Perhaps whatever remained of Luna was still sane enough to guide them to a happiness they would never know on their dying world. Or perhaps just being permitted the privilege of separating from that world was enough to bring them happiness even in their temporary oblivion.

Spike found their presence peaceful, but the sepulchral silence of the fortress disturbing. The way the light of their runes drifted off into machines without a sound, and how the only thing he could hear was the sound of his claws against the polished floor. It felt like a tomb, even though they were alive and always would be.

Passing the rows, he approached the final staircase and ascended. When he came to the door at the top, he stepped through. The frame was lined with a blue band of magic, and the moment he passed to the other side he felt a subtle change as he departed Equestria’s gravity and was instead held to the floor by magical rotors implanted far below the stone floor.

He looked back over his shoulder, back through the open door and to Equestria, and shivered. The doors were not uncomfortable to those who did not know how they worked. Spike, though, understood them well enough, and although he was only a few feet from his home he—and perhaps he alone, save for Twilight—knew just how far he had truly gone.

He forced the feeling away and proceeded farther into the ship, making his way to the bridge. The way was familiar to him. He had not built this ship, but had seen many like it in his lifetime. They were all essentially the same on the inside, all powered by the same systems and all precision-designed for the same specific purpose.

Upon entering the bridge, Spike was able to look out through the vast windows at the world far below. He felt a familiar pang of sadness upon seeing it. How so much of it was blue and green, and how pale wisps of pure-white clouds made their way over the surface. A world that looked like Equestria once had before its magnetic dynamo had had shifted its eternal cycle into the Age of Dragons.

Staring out through the window, Spike saw that the invasion had already begun. Thousands of objects were descending in a storm, arriving in straight lines and igniting with green light as they curved downward through the planet’s atmosphere.

“Hey, Spike,” said a friendly voice from behind him.

Spike, surprised, smiled and turned to face the pilot of this particular ship.

“Shining Armor,” he said. “I didn’t expect you’d be the one managing logistics on this one.”

Shining Armor smiled—to the extent that he still could. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world, little brother. I heard this one was a tough nut to crack. I figured you could use some moral support at least.”

Spike laughed. “You always did like playing support, didn’t you?”

“I did marry a literal god, didn't I? What other role could I possibly play?”

“And why you always played cleric in Ogres and Obliettes.”

Shining Armor chuckled. “I can’t believe you still remember that. We haven’t played in...I don’t remember how long it’s been. We should start up a game when we get back. I still write to Big Mac sometimes...but without Discord, well...”

Spike nodded. “I know. I know. But hey, it’s good to have you here at least. Even if the support you’re going to have to do is a lot more than moral. Probably some air support. And fire support. Maybe even some technical support. You know I can never figure out how to operate these dang spaceships. It’ll be just like old times. When we first started doing this.”

“Yeah...”

Shining Armor, as the pilot, was positioned in the center of the bridge, facing forward. The captain’s chair, so to speak, although he now totally lacked the anatomy necessary to sit. He was held in a large, perfectly clear tube: a head and the fragments of an exposed spine, linked below to a pair of lungs rapidly inflating and deflating, air forced in from a system of tubes that linked to the bottom of his tank. Next to them, his pony heart still beat; embedded into it, surrounded by tendrils of pale flesh, was his Alicorn crystal. His skull had retained slightly less than half his face, the other being bare, eyeless skull, the bordering skin tattered with the ends floating lazily in his medium. Part of his brain, itself showing signs of necrosis, had been linked to the top part of his tube by a single cable while his spine had been wired in either direction. His one remaining eye, though, was clear and bright. He was not a corpse, but still very much alive.

“You know,” said Spike. “As the sister to the Icon of Magic and the Avatar of the Alicorn, you qualify for a flesh body. You don’t have to live in the tank.”

“No offense to Luster, but those things always skeeved me out. Besides. I’m wired into the Iron Protector. I control all it's functions. My functions. I’m literally a spaceship. I mean, how cool is that?”

“Pretty cool,” admitted Spike. “I’m kind of jealous.”

Shining Armor laughed. His mouth, of course, did not move; it had been fused long ago. Rather, the cable in his brain conducted his thoughts to what he now considered to be his true body. At least for now.

“So, the situation?" continued Spike, "How bad is it?”

“Not bad at all. Not yet. Our temporal positioning was basically perfect. Industrial, heavily populated, but not to the point where they invented nukes or spaceflight. I’ve reinserted us fifteen years forward of our last attempt.”

Spike nodded. It was an odd thought, he supposed, that three hundred years had passed on Equestria while only fifteen had passed for this world. But that was the way the Door worked. Time and space were immaterial things in the face of magic.

“Do we have the supplies?”

Shining chuckled. “You have no idea. The auto-factories? The ones we put on the fourth planet? They’ve been running this whole time.”

Spike frowned, confused. “They didn’t try to shut them down?”

“Like I said. No space travel. No sense to even try to build it. We have seven million tripods for every one pony in existence, although nowhere near enough trajector cannons to fire them all at once. But still. It’s a low-gravity world, the whole thing is made of resources close to the surface.”

“And the transmitter?”

“Fully intact and ready for Milk.” Shining paused. “Which...begs the question?”

“Which question?”

“She’s here, isn’t she?”

Spike stared at him—then slowly nodded.

Shining Stared back at him. “Then why didn’t she try to stop it? Our factories? She had to know they were there.”

“Because she’s just one pony. Look at the way she works. She knows she can’t fight us directly. That’s why she used the Germ. What do you think one pony would do against a planet of factories? You know how angry those things get. Worse than those freaky electric hornets.”

“Makes sense,” admitted Shining Armor. “Would have been nice if that one had Milk on it, though. That would make our job a lot more productive.”

“It’s been dead too long,” sighed Spike. “No point in trying.” He looked back at the planet. “And now we just have to deal with this one. And whatever Twilight came up with to deal with the Germ.”

Shining sighed. “You didn’t read the binder, did you?”

Spike blushed. “I...skimmed it?”

“Spike, you’re my sister’s personal student. And you know how she gets about reading.”

“Luster is her personal student.”

“Yeah. But you were first.” Shining’s corroded horn flickered, and a hologram appeared near Spike. A dragon-sized, perfectly rendered model of a tripod mech—but one very different from the one Fleur had piloted three centuries ago.

“This is the new model,” said Shining. “I transmitted the code through reverse-time so the factories would have time to make the updates. It’s better sealed and magically reinforced against any incursion. Bigger, stronger, and linked directly with the new technology. No need for an actual ground-force anymore. We’ll be dispatching them in threes. One pony to two sub-commanders.”

Spike did not know what he meant. “To what?”

Shining gestured to some of the auxiliary stations around him. Spike, being concerned with the stunning view of the invasion, had not initially noticed them or had dismissed them. His attention had been elsewhere. Seeing them, though, he recoiled in horror.

“What—are those?”

Shining smiled. “A gift from the Cult of Kindness. The last of Equestria’s living animal population, shredded alive and reconstituted by the Alicorn. Immune to the Germ and just barely intelligent enough to bolster our numbers. I mean, they're not smart enough for extraction, but good for mechanical support.”

Spike approached one of them. It was green and deformed, its surface a pulsating mass of peculiar flesh and its large eyes staring outward in an expression of perpetual surprise. Forcing himself to overcome his disgust, he placed a hand on it. The thing opened a beak somewhere on its body and let out a squeak of confusion, and Spike pulled his hand back quickly. Not because of the sound, but because of the pain. The pain that felt exactly when he touched Fleur’s box. These things were not alive—not completely. They were held together by necromancy.

“Twilight...what have you done?”

“I think it’s a good thing,” said Shining. “Fluttershy would be happy knowing that her animal friends can help us one last time. Because that’s the last of them. All except the ones that live in the fire and ash now. The Alicorn only works on ponies, not on anything else. Although I guess we can terraform the planet again at some point. Once we have enough Milk.”

Spike nodded and stepped back from the flesh golem, allowing it to return to its work. “And the population?”

“Rebounded. Partially.”

“I mean technologically.”

“See for yourself. It’s pretty cool, actually.”

Shining projected a new, smaller model. Using his magic, Spike lifted it and examined it closely—and was amazed by the simultaneous ingenuity and absolute absurdity of what he held in his hand.

“What am I looking at?”

“A tripod-mech.”

Spike counted the legs. “Well, yeah. I can see that. But what is it?”

“They call it their A.R.E.S. program. They build these in response to our own mechs.”

“But why? I mean, what is...is that steel? Did they seriously build it out of metal? And—sweet Celestia, is it hollow? Is this meant to have pilots? Inside it?”

“Looks like it.”

“Why would they—the Extractor virtually only works on Milk-containing targets. It barely damages non-living objects unless it pulls Milk. Why would you put Milk inside your machine, let alone to leave it completely unarmored? Why not automate this?”

“I know, right? It gets weirder. Take a look at the armament.”

Spike extracted the components of the model. There were rockets and bolt-throwers, and something else. He took it off and expanded it, separating the pieces of the hologram.

“What is...what even is this?”

“I’m not entirely sure. I think it’s their response to our Extractors.”

“The Extractors work on magic. This...doesn’t. There’s no magic in this whole thing. Hydraulics, cylinders, fuel—and this. Some sort of...heat ray?” He looked back at Shining. “Does it actually function?”

“I sent Daisy down to test them out.”

The hologram shifted and played out a highly realistic version of events. Of a massed force of boxy, metal-coated mechs charging into a group of three scout-class tripods—and then standing virtually still as they were each vaporized in a single shot, torn apart from within by the heat of their living targets being stripped of their Milk. Then, eventually, managing to fire their primitive weapons enough to damage and destroy the scouting party but only after losing ninety percent of their numbers.

“And Daisy?”

“Retracted and put in a new mech. That’s how we do it. Mechs are cheap, we can always build more. But you saw it, didn’t you?”

Spike nodded. “They have none of the armor ours do. Our carapaces are magically reinforced. They...aped us, but without any magic at all. This isn’t even reverse engineering.” He faced Shining. “Why would they do this?”

Shining’s eye stared at him. His smile grew. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Shining, if it was obvious, I wouldn’t have asked.”

“These weren’t made to fight us. No one seriously thought we’d be back. These things were made to kill each other.”

Spike was about to argue, but then did some simple math. He sighed, suddenly realizing what was happening. “It’s 1914, isn’t it?”

Shining’s eye moved, the closest he could approximate to nodding with his skull permanently bolted in place in the center of his slightly luminescent tube. “They just shot Frantz Ferdinand. It’s starting here, same as it did on all the others. And it’s going to get worse. A lot worse. I think we may have started them toward fascism a little early.” He paused, shifting the holograms as they swam around Spike, showing views of the world through the system linked to his brain. One resolved more clearly from the ghostly fog. This one was less clear, not taken from a tripod but from Shining’s own sensors. It was an image, rendered only partially in color, of a young man with dark hair and blue eyes wearing a gray military uniform—and, even at his young age, already sporting a distinct mustache.

“He’s here.”

“I can see that,” sighed Spike. “He’s remarkably persistent, isn’t he?”

“Can you imagine what he’ll do in twenty five years with those tripods? Or, really, more advanced ones? There’s always a Hitler. And things always go bad. And on this planet? Spike, this is mercy.”

Spike understood why Shining had forced himself to think that way, but made no response. He only nodded, watching the descent of yet more tripods to the world below. The battles were no doubt already beginning. They were of course unnecessary. But they would happen anyway. It was the nature of the industrial process he had helped build over so many centuries of constant development.

“It seems strange,” he mused, “that of all worlds, this one. These people who can’t even master the most rudimentary magic. Why we would bother with them at all.”

“Have you consulted the Xyuka Codex?”

Spike shivered. “Scootaloo was my friend. I can’t stand seeing...what they’ve done to her. And I don’t trust that thing that they put in her head. Whatever creature it came from, a thing that sheds whole bodies like I shed my skin, I don’t want to know what it was or where it came from.”

“I’ve seen her. I’ve talked to...it. It explained. But you’re a wizard. I think you already know.”

Shining Armor projected a hologram of one of them. The strange bipedial creatures. A diagram of them. They were thicker on this planet, more angular, and had larger eyes than some of the other versions, but Spike knew them all-too-well. And he knew what they were.

“The Proto-Vandrare.”

Shining nodded. “They are the most concentrated source of raw magic known.”

“Despite never using it. Just building machines and making more and more science.”

Shining paused for a moment. “Twilight explained it to me, once. that must have been...a thousand years ago? Two thousand? It’s their brains. The way they work. They’re too...procedural. At one point, they had almost limitless power. One Proto-Vandrare could rival an alicorn, or even ten alicorns. Or a thousand. But their brain is made in such a way that they seek out natural laws, they build machines. Incessantly. And when they do, it forces their magic toward enforcing those laws.” He paused again. “...or, reinforcing those laws. Making them immune to the effects of their own magic.”

“They neutralize themselves.”

“The only way to control limitless power is to direct that limitless power back on itself. Their magic contains itself. I think it has to. They could rip a galaxy in half with a thought if the full force of their magic wasn’t focused on making sure that doing so was impossible.”

“But our magic still works.”

“For now. Because their world is young. Who knows? In a hundred, a thousand years? We’ve never gone that far forward. They might eventually get smart enough to neutralize all magic in their own universe. Or other universes. Without ever knowing that it was even possible.”

“And we’ve never gone back far enough to see their ancient wizards.”

Shining paused. “Do you...even know what a Vandrare is?”

“No,” snapped Spike. “And I don’t want to. I really, really don’t want to.”

“The...the Codex...Scootaloo...told me. And you’re right. I’d really rather not have known...”

Spike suppressed the shuddering that threatened to overtake him. Even so far from Equestria, he still felt the memories. Still had a sense of what the word meant. Of something that had once been, or had been forced to be, perhaps the last time the world had ended—or perhaps so long before.

Instead, he focused on the task at hand. Twilight had sent him to get the Milk. He intended to do so.

“Other than these A.R.E.S. mechs, do they have anything that can hurt us?”

“Inherently? No. But the Heretic is down there, somewhere. For all we know the Germ was just the beginning of what she’s made in the time we’ve given her.”

“We can’t worry about something we don’t know. It isn’t productive. That’s our future selfs' problem. How many mechs do they have?”

“Not nearly enough.”

“Where are they concentrated?”

“You’re looking at it. North America. We’re in geosynchronous orbit over the continent.”

“Then we will direct our full force there. Target their secondary cities first.”

“The old one-two, then?”

Spike smiled, but without humor. Only out of the barest nostalgia, a thing he found somewhat disgusted him. “It always works, doesn’t it?”

“It might be the only way. Even she doesn’t know, does she?”

“No,” said Spike. “But when it comes to the Heretic, it’s not smart to bet on anything. But we’ll try it the basic way first. Then get fancy if we need to.”

He stepped down from the elevated bridge.

“Where are you going?” asked Shining.

“It’s just boring procedural stuff for now.”

“Really? So you’re going to leave that to me?”

“You’re good at that sort of thing. You can handle it.”

“Of course I’m good at it. But what are you here for if I'm doing all the work?”

“I deal with what happens when it isn’t boring and procedural anymore. And it never stays that way for long.”

Shining sighed. “So true. It’s not like I can go anyway. Can’t move. They cut off my body. Boy did that hurt.”

“Spaceship, remember?”

Shining paused. “Yeah...spaceship.”

“I’ll be in the interface bay. Checking on the pilots.”

“I’ll see you there. Because it’s plugged into my occidental lobe. I can’t stop seeing. Ever.” He sighed. “At least I don’t sleep anymore. Those implants give you the weirdest dreams...”

Spike nodded, even though he had no idea what that meant. He supposed he never would know—and he never could.

Author's Note

Hope derives from belief; like faith, it is a weaker shadow of unshakable knowledge in the truth of inevitable and permanent victory.

Chapter 5: The Reusable Soldier

The command ship was as large as it needed to be. Which was, in in most cases, large but not massive. The automatic factories on the nearest low-gravity planet made a large ship unnecessary. Endless cities devoid of any living population, built from self-replicating fission-powered machines were continuously engaged in endlessly harvesting, packaging, and distributing resources as the command ship demanded. It was a form of production that had proved totally useless for any other purpose. The population of Equestria had never changed substantially since Twilight had become Princess and eventually created the Alicorn. It had never decreased due to her sheer will—but at the cost that, as the population became increasingly immortal, it could never grow. So material or energy resources were never a problem, and there was never a lack of either. Save for one. The only resource that mattered. The Milk.

The purpose of the orbital vessel was not to fight directly. That was the point of precision temporal insertion, a field that Shining Armor was considered the reigning master in. The world below had no weapon which could attack them directly and no allies that could assist them. The ship, as armored as it was, was perfectly safe simply by distance. The Proto-Vandrare could probably even see it, if they cared to look with a proper telescope, but even as close as it was there was nothing they could do to stop it. It was probably better that they did not comprehend the utter futility of their position—and best for Spike that he never thought about it directly.

Instead, the Iron Protector was meant as a base of operations. It housed the pilots that operated the tripod mechs and fliers that served as ground forces.

Spike entered one of the banks, and was immediately struck by a strange familiarity. For a moment, he looked up at the vast shelf-like levels of the hollow cylinder and once again found himself a foot-tall dragonling staring up at Twilight’s shelves filled with thousands upon thousands of books that he had organized himself with painstaking precision. Except these were larger. They were not shelves. They were a weapon.

Circling each level were individual cubicles large enough to fit the ponies that sat in their chairs, their hand carapaces separated to allow for the living myelin of the control system to be plugged directly into the circuitry of their transplanted bodies. The cubicles were cockpits, each with a door lined with a blue line around its rim—and each one was both visible from the ship, from the rear of them, despite the fact that they were also on the planet. Each pony was simultaneously on the ship and in the cockpit of their tripod mech, raining down chaos on the Proto-Vandrare across the planet.

Spike examined this, hearing the dull whir of hundreds of machines surrounding him—and jumped when he heard a sudden explosion. A burst of flame came from his side and one of the cockpits snapped out of its alcove, the door slamming closed with a resounding clang as it locked its armored iris closed.

“Dang it!” cried a dark gray stallion, slamming his fist into the controls of his chair.

“Thunderlane,” said Spike, approaching him. “Are you okay?”

“Okay? No I’m not okay!” He disconnected one of his hands and rubbed the lines implanted into the back of his neck. “This thing has some kick to it, any harder and it would have pulled my head off! Again! Do you know how much that smarts?”

“Not really, no.”

He groaned. “Of course you wouldn’t.” He began typing on one of the controls. “Worse, I lost my mech! To one of those stupid clunky metal jalopies!”

“It’s fine. We have more. Reinsert.”

“What do you think I’m doing right now? I’m no quitter!”

The edge of his door flashed with magic and opened once again, his cockpit sliding forward and integrating into a new mech. Through its forward screen, Spike could see it beginning to rise, emerging from its landing pod and standing to its full height. There was a spark of magic as the system reintegrated the engines, and Thunderlane was off again. Spike paused to watch the world passing his screen, now visible at eye-level for an eighty-foot mech. A world still green with a blue sky—but now with so much more fire than it really should have had.

All systems were nominal. The last time he had invaded this world, the linkages were not nearly as sophisticated. The pilots had actually been piloting their own mechs on the surface. Retrieval was accomplished through an energy-intensive teleport. It had taken days to recover the sick, let alone to recover the bodies when the Germ hit. Fortunately, steps had been taken. Emergency systems to provide them with Alicorn so that even if they died they would never truly be lost. All ponies were immortal. Such was the will of Twilight Sparkle.

Seeing nothing amiss, Spike left the room through the archway that connected it to the long equipment loading corridor. It was barely lit, but as he approached, he saw a dull light in the distance. It was a body-mounted light belonging to an earth pony pushing a loader down the track, all alone. Supplies that Spike was not expecting—until he drew closer and realized that it was not supplies at all.

The pony was Parcel Post, his head grafted into a heavy support-body. The loader he was pushing carried a specialized crate, the sides of which were open to reveal a box that had become all-too familiar. A box covered in insidious, glowing runes.

Spike stopped. For a moment, he could hardly talk. But he knew he had to.

“Fleur.”

Parcel Post stopped, looking confused and even somewhat ashamed.

“Spike” said Fleur, her voice projected mechanically from her container.

“You’re actually going to do it.”

“Am I not a mare of my word, Spike? I have said that zis is what I wish to do. And nothing is going to stop me. Not even you. As you have promised.”

Spike looked up to Parcel Post. “Can we...have a moment?”

He turned to the box.

“Yes,” said Fleur. “Zis is an acceptable request.”

Post hesitated, but then nodded to Spike and walked into the light of the control cylinder, watching the pilots and their screens intently and with an expression of awe on his face at the wonders that Equestrian technology had achieved.

Spike was silent for several moments, but forced himself to speak. “I am not going to try to stop you.”

“Is zat so?”

“I don’t think you’d let me.”

“Ah. See? So long together, you really were paying attention, no?”

Spike smiled. “But I really wish you wouldn’t. Please, Fleur. I can’t...I can’t lose you again.”

“And you shall not. But zis? I am sorry, Spike. Zis is something I must do. You...may not understand. But it is very much important to me.”

Spike held up his hand to the box, but Fleur stopped him.

“No. None of zat. Not for my sake. I am not dying, Spike. Ze system, she is safe. Zis is not goodbye.”

“Can I...can I at least see you?”

She paused, taken aback. “Spike, no. Zis is...not ze time. Zis is not something you wish to see. Believe me.”

“I know what you are. What that planet did to you. What I did to--”

“NO. It was not you zat did zis to me.”

“I was in command--”

“I will not have zis debate!”

“Then at least look me in the eye,” he said. “I know what you are, what you had to become. But please. I don’t...if you...if you...”

Fleur paused. “You could not bear for ze result to be as with Rarity. But zis is not ze same. I am not beautiful. Not anymore.”

“Just...show me. Please.”

Fleur sighed, but acquiesced. From an internal mechanism, the box began to open.

The metal hissed and clicked, motivated by internal mechanisms that existed only in an abstract sense. The black shielding split and then, with a dull, quiet hiss, slid apart. The runes did not move, as they were not inscribed on the metal but rather projected onto it from the outside—so the metal slid away, smooth and unmarked, while the spell instead ingrained itself onto the glass tank held within, the shimmering purple light casting volumetric beams through the turbid liquid contained within.

Spike had known. In a fully abstract sense, he had always understood what she was. Now, though, he saw her. What 997-G had done to her, and the sheer and terrible lengths that Twilight was willing to go to achieve absolute survival of the pony race.

Her body had already been severed and disincorporated long before she had died. As such, all that remained was the head, floating in the exact center of the box, roughly on its side and facing down. Her skin, once so white and covered in a coat so very silky, had become brown and taught, a layer of pale mummified leather clinging to shriveled muscle and partially-exposed vertebrae. Little of her mane remains apart from a few gray strands emerging in clumps, floating lazily around her. Her eyes had long since dissolved, leaving a pair of gaping skeletal holes. Her face, like the remainder of her skin, had retracted, her lips curling and drawing back to reveal her teeth, her jaw fixed perpetually open in an expression that looked almost like a scream. Blood no longer flowed through her. Her brain had hardened and solidified, and she no longer drew breath. There was no longer a reason to plug the hole where she had once met her robotic anthropomorphic body. In the reflection of her glass prison, Spike could see the exposed remnants of shriveled veins and her decayed spinal cord—and several glints of silvery wire.

The only part that remained close to what it had once been was her horn. They had not cut if off as they did for most of the dead, to better fit them in the boxes. Fleur, like the rest of them, could no longer cast magic; her body was devoid of Milk, powered solely by the Alicorn. And yet that last remnant of what she had once been still remained, perhaps treasured or perhaps an unending mockery.

“Now you can understand,” she said, softly. When she spoke, the mixture of formaldehyde she floated in ignited with sickly green light, its glow illuminating the gossamer threads of viscosity that linked her head to the media that sustained her and prevented her from decaying further. The last remnant, the head of her long-dead corpse, the solidified anchor that kept her soul from ever being truly severed. Such was the ultimate gift of Twilight Sparkle: perfect immortality, and an endless utopia of permanent survival.

“You’re still beautiful.”

“No, Spike. I am dead. Do not lie to my face. But, more important, please. Do not lie to yourself. I am...at peace. With what I am. Yet I was always so afraid that you, you would...”

“I always knew what you are. And no matter what your body looks like, you’re still Fleur De’Lis.” Spike smiled, staring into her empty eye sockets. “Please,” he said. “Please be safe. Just...come back to me, okay?”

Fleur’s eyeless and expressionless face stared back at him, unable to move in the slightest, but the cloudy media flashed.

“This, I promise,” she said.

Spike gave the glass a final poke, over the spot where her nose once had been. The pain was excruciating, but he ignored it. Then the box began to close, and Parcel Post had already started to return.

“I am ready,” said Fleur. “Load me into my new body.”

Parcel Post looked to Spike.

“It’s not my decision,” he said. “She may be dead, but she’s still a pony. She still gets to choose.” He nodded to the box. “Good luck.”

“No,” said Fleur. “You will be the one who requires the luck. Please preserve it for yourself. Until I return.”

Spike smiled, and watched as she was wheeled off to battle.

Author's Note

The machines which churn forth love and happiness derive their action from fuel. This fuel may be specific.

Chapter 6: The Ghosts of the Lens

It was night on the planet below. Their world obeyed different rules than the one Spike had arisen from, and did not require continuous effort to constantly control the motion of celestial bodies. His world no longer had night, or ever truly had day. The magic that was required to raise the sun and moon had long since departed, funneled instead into the Alicorn and to the works of the Icon of Magic. The familiar the sun had grown alien and perpetually glowed dim scarlet on the horizon beyond the black clouds of dust and ash, unable to ever truly rise or set.

Perhaps, if he had been down there, Spike would have slept, looking up at the starry sky he could only recall from his most distant memories. From high above, though, as he looked down on the darkness and spreading fires of his own creation, he instead busied himself with the task at hand.

Behind him, Shining floated in his tube, his eye half closed—until it suddenly blinked and focused, his mind having surfaced from whatever comatose madness he existed in when his attention was fully devoted to the function of his surrogate body. His dreams, if they could be called that, had been cooped by the machinery, and he took whatever opportunity he could to avoid the sick parody of sleep he was given.

“You should be sleeping,” he said.

“I have to oversee the distributions...the Proto-Vandraresent out airships. They’re diverting their forces away from their Island City, as we expected, but I need to balance everything so they don’t get suspicious...and now I have to get units out of Europe. France just invaded Germany. Might as well let them go to work...” He rubbed his face. He was tired. It felt as though he could sleep for a thousand years. Disturbingly, he was aware that he, as a dragon, was physically capable of doing just that. What the world would look like when he awoke, though, terrified him to the core.

“You were talking to Fleur.”

Spike did not answer, but instead went back to his work.

“I never took you for a necrophiliac, Spike.”

Spike stopped. “It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Wasn’t what?”

Spike turned slowly, glaring at the illuminated tube behind him. Shining Armor stared back with his one remaining eye, almost defiantly.

“You approved her for this mission. You signed the paperwork. It was you. Wasn’t it?”

“Of course it was me. Did it really take you that long to figure out? There’s only three of us that have that authority, and you’re one of them. And at this point Twilight can’t stay conscious for more than a few minutes a week.”

“You’re my brother. Why would you do that to me?”

“You? Spike, don’t be dense. You didn’t even factor into the decision.”

“Great. How comforting.”

Shining sighed. “She needs this. You know that.”

“For what?” snapped Spike. “Revenge? How? Why? Where does that even fit into this? What’s even the point?” He gestured to the planet. “This is war.” He paused. “No. It isn’t even that. Not anymore. Vengeance doesn’t do a dang thing. We keep emotions out of this. We have to--”

“Did that dragon evolution thing give you a thicker skull?”

“Excuse me?”

“Revenge? Really? Spike, this isn’t a Power Ponies comic book. Nopony cares about revenge, especially not her.”

“Then what?”

“What? Spike, you know what happened to her. You saw it.”

“She doesn’t look much different to me than you do.”

“Then you’re an idiot too, because there’s a big difference. I’m still alive. That’s kind of the point. This isn’t about getting ‘revenge’, it’s about leaving a job unfinished.”

“You’ve said a lot of stupid things in your life, Shining, but that takes the cake--”

“Just listen to me. I’m older than you.”

“By, like, fifteen years.”

“That’s enough. Listen. Do you know how she died?”

Spike tensed. “N…no.”

“I do. I read the reports. The reports she submitted. After her own death. She was in a tripod in a Celestia-forsaken place called Leeds on some pointless waterlogged island. She had just extracted an adult female and an adult male, and was about to process their son when the Germ hit her. Have you seen what it does to a pony?”

“No.”

“Consider yourself lucky. They go fast. And there is pain. A lot of it. And so much blood.”

“Please. I don’t want to think about her going through that.”

“But she did. It burned out her motor cortex before she could fire the trigger. She killed a kid's parents, but didn’t finish the job. Left him alive.”

Spike felt his stomach sink. “And the…‘kid’?”

“How should I know? There were no survivors. But knowing how Proto-Vandrare react to stress, he was probably eaten by roving bands of cannibals. Or, if he did survive, he would be so psychologically damaged that he would never amount to anything useful.” He paused. “Or he could rise to a level of power and depravity that makes Hitler look like Fluttershy.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“To make a point. She didn’t finish the job. And neither did we. We left the planet halfway. She won’t be happy until this is all finished. Until we have the Milk. Until that kid, if he’s still alive, is fed to my sister.”

Spike paused for what felt like hours. “I didn’t want to know any of that. You’re just making the job harder.”

“Then why are you even here, Spike?” snapped Shining Armor, growing increasingly exasperated.

“To do my job, same as you--”

“No. No, you’re not, and you can’t be. Maybe that’s it. You can’t know what it feels like. To be like her. Or me. You just can’t.”

“Because Twilight is your sister? You know what she means to me--”

“Forget Twilight! We’re all doing this for Twilight, and for Equestria. To keep us alive. No matter what it takes. But what we’re doing? How we’re doing it? These are terrible things. Horrible things. They make me sick to the stomach I don’t even have anymore. And sure, you can pretend we’re not. It’s fine up here, isn’t it, when it’s just a ball of water and green. But deep down, you know what we’re doing. You know it’s wrong, but you know we have to do it anyway. Because as wrong as it is, it’s necessary.”

“Again. Not making this any easier.”

“But that’s the thing. You’re not really part of it, are you? You could walk away. Whenever you want.”

Spike scowled, bearing his teeth. “I would never--”

“But you could. The rest of us? Me, Fleur, Twilight, all our friends? We can’t. I can’t. We’re connected to the Alicorn, and the Alicorn needs Milk. Without it, we all die. Permanently. We have to do it. But you don’t. You can survive Equestria, heck, it makes you stronger. If we all die, you’re still here.”

Spike took several long steps toward the glass, but Shining Armor did not break eye contact.

“Exactly,” he said, quietly. “If you all die, I’m still here.”

Shining Armor paused, monumentally holding eye contact, but then was forced to avert his gaze.

“I’m a dragon,” continued Spike. “On some level, my brain is wired for violence. Cruelty, maybe. But that’s not me. But it’s a part of me, I guess. And I can hide in there if I need to.” He paused. “But you. You’re a pony. How do you do it, Shining? What keeps you going?”

Shining Armor paused, his lungs repeatedly inflating and deflating, filled by mechanical pumps somewhere below the deck of the bridge. Then he looked up once more.

“You know what I’m fighting for, Spike.”

His horn lit, casting a vague blue fog in the antibiotic fluid in which he was suspended, the glow shining bright from the slowly-propagating cracks that had formed over constant years of extended use. His eye went distant, and the room fell silent—and Spike saw them. The holograms, emerging from the holographic mist of Shining Armor’s memory, their bodies faded and grainy as the ancient memories began to decay. Shining Armor was not a dragon. He could not remember so far—and even this memory, his most precious, was slowly dying.

To figures stepped out of the ether, their bodies translucent and monochrome in Shining Armor’s flickering blue light. Two alicorns. Two fifths of the Alicorn. One tall and thin, and the other much younger, looking so much like a smaller version of her mother—and the spectre of Cadence paused, smiling lovingly at her husband, who stared back from his tank, his one eye wide as he stared at her, his exposed heart beating ever more quickly.

“They’re not dead,” he said, quietly. “They’re still alive. Still doing their part, just like we are here...but they’re not dead.”

Spike shivered. “I know.”

“But you have no idea how close we are. Just a little more Milk. A little more power. Just a little more, and they can come back. They can all come back. Because of them, and Twilight...”

A third specter emerged from his memory. One of his sister, of Twilight, and Spike needed to look away. He could not bear to see her whole when he knew what she had been forced to become.

“Just a little more. That’s all we need. The dead? They’ll come back. And us? Me? I won’t be like this anymore. I’ll be able to see them. I'll be able to hug my daughter again...I’ll have my family back, Spike, if we can just get a little more...”

A hologram emerged from the opposite side. Of Shining Armor. What he had looked like before the surgeries. Young and strong, with the body of a pony instead of the limitless mechanical factory that had been grafted to his marginally-alive remains in the name of Milk.

“No,” whispered Spike. “Shining, don’t do this to yourself...”

Shining Armor did not listen. His hologram joined the fading memory of his family. Flurry Heart jumped with joy and hugged him, and he rest his head against his tall wife’s shoulder. In his tank, though, Spike saw his eye wide—and saw the tears dripping from it, floating and diffusing in the fluid that kept him alive. He had of course seen them. The five unspeakable monstrosities grafted to Twilight’s pentagram, the lenses that kept her alive and conscious. He, like so few, understood the true nature of the Alicorn, and what it had cost.

Which answered Spike’s question. What kept him alive in that tank was hope.

“Shining. Shining!”

Shining armor did not respond. Spike stepped toward the tank, close enough to see the tattered ends of Shining’s cranial nerves drifting in his fluid. He watched as his friend—his adopted brother—wept quietly at the sight of what had once been, trapped in his own memories and the corrosive fallacy of his own hope for the future.

Spike raised a single sharpened claw and tapped on the glass. The faces of the memories contorted in horror as they disintegrated into sparkling magical dust, and every remaining muscle on Shining’s body tensed. His heart skipped a beat, and he blinked, confused.

“Spike! I told you! Don’t tap on the glass! Ever!”

“I need you to focus.”

“I am focused, I was just--”

“No. You weren't. You answered the question. But I’m still right. This isn’t the place for emotion. If you want to see them again, we need this planet’s Milk. And if we want to get it, we need to do our jobs.”

Shining’s forced breathing slowed. “Right...right. I’m sorry. I got...distracted.” He looked up. “But you never answered my question. Why do you do this, Spike?”

Spike shrugged. “It’s what I’ve always done. I don’t see any reason to stop now.”

“That isn’t a very good reason.”

Spike returned to his controls and to oversee the war on the planet below. He let out a long sigh.

“I know.”

Author's Note

Immortality is the only true end and, reflected back upon itself, provides the mechanism for the means in turn.

Chapter 7: The One who Escaped

Preparations were underway and accelerating. The process was going according to all plans and projections. The war was all but won, because every war was all but won. Resources were limited save for the one that mattered; Equestria did not have the fuel necessary to engage foes under circumstances were victory was not fully guaranteed.

The machines were being built. The Soichet Ring was almost assembled. War raged on the planet below, but to Spike, it was a distant and abstract thing. Not a thing of consequence. The extractors equipped to every tripod were hard at work extracting Milk the way they once had so long ago, driving it directly to the Iron Defender where primitive processing centrifuges could convert it into the power they needed to run the rudiments of the operation. The process was of course inefficient; Milk could not be processed and purified properly by mechanical systems. But it was enough. It was part of the reason they had targeted the cities. The world below was not yet urban, but still agrarian. Most of the residents dwelt outside those places, and would continue to do so until their farmland depleted and the resulting depression would force a massive demographic change. At least, that was how it had gone on most of the others.

Spike oversaw this with exacting, mechanical precision, the way he had so many thousands of times before. He had a list. The first list had been written by Twilight, obviously, but the list he used now was of his own creation. A habit he had developed from her a long time ago.

One this particular hour of this particular day, he was examining the flight crew, taking notes on a clipboard as he inspected the machines.

The flight banks were not assembled the same way as the mech control cylinders. Flyers required less space, so instead of being mounted in a tower they were instead mounted perpendicular on the walls of a long, high-ceiling hallway. As Spike walked through, he could hear the sounds of their voices from inside their containers.

“Bogeys on the left! I can’t hold the formation!”

“Then roll out. Beta, sideline with her.”

“I can’t get there, I have to go around, dang it they’re all in the way--”

“Yeah, you’re going to have that on these big jobs, switch to moonrise-four configuration and come up from below--”

“They’re coming from above! I can’t shake them!”

“Hold on, Kicker, I’m on my way from your five--”

Spike stopped at one that was especially quiet. He accessed the control system and checked the metrics, disliking what he found. Then a sudden scream came from inside the container. A scream partially of pain, but also of rage.

“Curse you, Red Baron!” she cried. “I’m re-syncing, squad, ETA one minute forty!”

Spike pressed the eject, opening the drawer. It unsealed and folded outward, revealing the head held within. She, like all the pilots, did not use a body when in flight; the interface time was too low to sustain the reaction speed necessary. Instead, she had been grafted directly into the system, her connector collar and pseudo-spine plugged directly into the wires and life-support tubes that ran through the transparent assembly of her system.

She looked up at Spike, although of course could not see him. Her eyes had been removed, replaced with connector implants that were also wired directly to the machine, feeding her optic nerves what her flyer saw.

“What the heck?! Put me back in! I can do this!”

“Lightning Dust. You’ve gone through nineteen flyer units in the past two hours and thirty one over the last sixteen.”

“That’s what they’re for, isn’t it?”

“The flyers aren’t a problem. We can always make more. But breaking the soul-bond that many times can cause—does cause—permanent nerve damage. You’re taking a break. Now.”

“I can still do this, we almost have them, let me just shoot down that dang red menace--”

“That is an order, Lightning Dust. Get out. Or I tear you out.”

Her frown turned to a brief expression of fear, then she grumbled to herself. Spike turned to the pony beside her.

“You’ve got this, Spitfire?”

“Squad’s getting hit hard,” she said, more engaged on her flying than on Spike and Lightning Dust. “Pretty impressive for wooden planes. We’re faster, but they turn tighter.”

“I’ll submit and engineering report,” said Spike, marking it down. “But the next batch of flyers will have to come all the way from the next planet.”

“We’ll do our best until then.”

The extraction arm arrived, driven on the support rail for the bank. It hummed to life, reaching into Lightning Dust’s chamber and unscrewing her release connectors. With a squeak of pain, it pulled her and her nerves free, her Alicorn crystal momentarily taking up all life-support functions. As she was pulled out, a temporary body arrived on a second rail, and Lightning Dust was inserted into it. The scream of reconnecting was louder than her squeak, although she tried to suppress it. She barely even made a sound when the five-inch long needles of her visor were clicked into her eye-sockets by a secondary arm.

She stepped off the rail, immediately shaking. Her body was of course mechanical, but Spike knew what that meant. The nerve damage was already setting in.

“You’re not okay.”

“It’s just adrenaline,” she snapped, trying to get control of her shaking arms and her shivering robot body.

“You don’t have adrenal glands.”

“Then the body must be crap. Get me another.”

Spike sighed. “Come on. Let’s get some coffee into you. When was the last time you slept?”

“I had an amphetamine inserter mounted to my frontal lobe. Winners don’t need sleep.”

Spike raised a metaphorical eyebrow. “An injector...that’s against regulations for pilots?”

Lightning Dust backpedaled. “Hey, it’s a war. I need it to do my job. The dose isn’t even turned up, I don’t use it half the time--”

“I wonder if that’s why you keep losing soul-bond with your flyers.”

She snarled silently, but followed him toward the pilot break room. “You can’t bench me,” she said. “I’m your best pilot. I’m the best flyer in Equestria.”

“Save for Rainbow Dash.”

“Who is a flayed skin stored in a block of enchanted ice. Who hasn’t flown in...” She paused, confused. “I don’t...I don’t know how old I am...”

“She’s sleeping. A long nap. I think she’d like that.” He took her elbow and led her forward past the bank of other pilots engaged in the war below. “But you’re not wrong. You’re a good flyer. But if you keep this up, you’ll burn out.”

“I’m not a washout, not a washout...”

“Then for all our sake, please be more careful.”

Lightning Dust stopped again. She looked up at Spike. Without her eyes, there was no clear expression, but Spike understood what she was feeling. The nerve damage did not just affect her motor cortex, and pieces had been removed to make way for her stimulant injections. Her addition to flight had left her confused, missing parts of her mind. She was having trouble remember who, and where, she was. Insanity or structural catatonia were, of course, an expected inevitable consequence of flyer operation.

“It’s just that...I remember,” she said, softly. “When I’m in there. When I have my eyes. My real eyes. I’m...I’m flying. Again. Just like before...before they took my wings...”

Spike froze. He knew why the anthrofication had been necessary. Why they had been given new bodies. Why their magic and flight had been lost. He knew it, but only in an academic sense. That bodies cost magic according to numerous variables, and the Alicorn could not sustain the sheer mass of flesh required to have them stay ponies. That these bodies had been deemed the most efficient for the mechanical processes necessary for Milk extraction, that they had in fact been based on the superficial appearance of the Proto-Vandrare, the race so successful and powerful that in at least one incidence had given rise to something so terrible that the Xyuka Codex had actually noticed their existence.

And yet he could not find the words to explain this to her. Not in a way that would justify what he had allowed to be done to them. Especially when he stood before her with his own strong, healthy wings folded neatly on his back.

“Just...be more careful. If you burn up, you won’t be able to fly again. Not until Twilight fixes you all.”

“I know,” she said, quietly. “I just...it would be easier if...if I were there...”

“What, in the flyer? You burnt out thirty one of them. You’d have only had the one that you were in.”

She looked up at him, her black visor staring into his eyes. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s true.”

Spike led her to the break room and left. He had wanted to stay with her, but now he found he lacked the courage. Instead, he went ahead with his checks.

He was not twenty feet down the corridor when he heard Shining Armor’s voice.

“Spike. There’s a problem. It’s Fleur.”

The clip board shattered in Spike’s claw as he tensed.

“Careful! We can’t grow any more trees on Equestria, we can’t make more of those--”

“Fleur. What’s wrong? NOW.”

“I don’t actually know. I’ve lost contact with her tripod.”

Spike felt his heart drop. He took a deep breath. “Was it...was it destroyed?”

“No. I would know that. The telemetry would tell me. I’ve just...lost connection to it.”

“That is literally impossible.”

“I know. Tripods can’t be disengaged from the gate system without ejecting the pilot back here. But I didn’t receive an eject notification. She’s not here. But I’m not in contact. This has never happened before. I think something’s wrong.”

“I’m on my way. Where was she operating?”

“Outside Albuquerque.”

“Can you pinpoint it exactly? Using the ship’s occulus?”

“I can approximate the last known position of her tripod, but I’m not receiving active telemetry.”

Spike frowned. “Which still triggers even if the Tripod is destroyed.”

“In case we need to recover a body. Yeah. I know. You can’t just turn it off. There’s a group near that site. I’m diverting Roseluck to inspect.”

“Good. I’ll use her door to insert.”

“Are you sure that’s such a good idea?”

“I’ll be fine. I didn’t get to be Grand Seneschal for my pretty face. But if she’s removed from that box, if they separate her from those runes--”

“I know. Go ahead. I’ll handle the operation up here until you get back. And I’ll try to adjust the occulus to trace her magic signature, but it will take time.” He paused. “And don’t tell me you told me so.”

Spike did not, even though he had. There was no time to be petty. It had all been going so well--but now, he could feel the beginning of the situation fraying. Of it all about to fall apart around him. Just as he knew it always would.

Roseluck was located on the twenty seventh level of cylinder eleven. Spike did not bother using the latter meant for ponies; rather, he spread his wings and took flight, rising in seconds to the appropriate location and landing gracefully on the circular catwalk—but not before having taken a glance at Fleur’s door. It had been sealed, the same way it did when a mech pilot ejected. Except there was no sign that the eject had been fired. The seat and control assembly were nowhere to be found, meaning they were on the other side—but the door was inactive. The gate was closed. Shining Armor had been unaware, and was unable to restart it.

Spike entered the door that led to Roseluck’s machine, feeling gravity once again change as he passed. The red-haired pony looked up from a window that showed an enormous blue sky and the cliffs of a rocky dessert outside.

“Spike,” she said. “Shining said you’d be here.”

“Emergency exit?”

Roseluck had one hand free that she had been using for manual controls. She gestured toward a thin ladder. “Bottom level, on the mechanical floor. You can’t miss it.”

“Thanks.” Spike grabbed the top of the latter. “What’s the situation out there?”

“Quiet for now, but I’ve lost connection to my greenie-buddies. I think there might be dudes out there, but I can’t see them now.” She seemed concerned. “Are you going to be okay? What if the Germ gets you?”

“It doesn’t affect dragons. I’ll be fine. But keep watch, okay?”

“Will-do, Spike.”

Spike nodded and slid down the latter to the lower levels of the mech to where the airlock was located. He did not pause as he stepped into the claustrophobic chamber, and did not hesitate when he pulled the release handle.

Immediately, the light of the hostile alien world struck his body. It was warm and, to an extent, felt nice. The hot, dry air of the planet blew onto him, and he was reminded of Equestria—except for the smell. This planet smelled fresh and alive. It was not his home.

The atmosphere reeked of oxygen, though, at a sickeningly high concentration. Spike, being accustomed to pony atmospheres, was able to tolerate it better than a normal dragon might be able to, but it was still a hindrance. His magic would not fail him, at least not immediately, but it would be much weaker.

One of the segmented effector tendrils from Roseluck’s mech stretched out to him and Spike leapt onto it, allowing it to lower him to the bright rocky floor of what he realized was a desert valley. This was the last place Fleur had been, and he saw no signs of wreckage or even a battle of any kind—although he could smell a slight hint of smoke from something in the distance.

To his west, though, he realized that he was near a building. A large structure, like a factory or powerplant, although it appeared to be uninhabited and perhaps abandoned entirely. Since there were no clues outside, he assumed that the facility was the place to start.

He was aware that a Proto-Vandrare airship was in the area, but determined that it was of no consequence. The A.R.E.S. mechs had been designed to fight tripods; they would not know what to do with dragon, and probably would not even recognize him as a threat. To be safe, though, he put one claw to his mouth and breathed a thin stream of green fire onto it. At his command, it assembled itself into burning letters written in a language that he had only recently started to understand. These twisted and turned as he used them to create a spell that Twilight herself had taught him and, after casting the groundwork for it, he snapped his fingers, rendering himself completely invisible. He had no intention of fighting. Not when it could put Fleur in danger.

As he was crossing the bridge, he heard some sounds in the distance. Then Roseluck’s voice came to him on a magical channel.

“Um, Spike? There’s a dude here. I think he’s throwing pieces of metal at me?”

“Just one?”

“That I can see. Um...what should I do?”

“Extract him.”

Roseluck paused. “Is that...moral?”

“I’m not exactly an expert in that,” sighed Spike. “Just think of it like picking a flower.”

“Right, right, that makes sense.” From the distance, Spike heard the whine of an extraction beam cutting through the air. “Wow,” said Roseluck. “He really popped, didn’t he? It’s kind of neat how you can see the bones when the Milk comes out.”

Spike paused, considering, but continued. In all honesty, he had never met a Proto-Vandrare in person, never had a conversation with one. Nor did he intend to. But it was suspicious that one would attempt to engage a tripod mech all alone with a simple bolt-thrower. Suspicious and concerning.

He crossed the bridge and entered the facility, pausing at the entrance to get his bearings. The architecture was certainly that of the Proto-Vandrare, but it was not a military installation or even a research center. It had not been refitted for any critical purpose. Spike could not fathom why Fleur had broken off from the others and come to this place.

Then he heard footsteps behind him. His suspicious were immediately confirmed as he was approached by a group of Proto-Vandrare in dirty military uniforms. Some were holding bolt-throwers, save for one about the same height as Spike who was carrying a much larger weapon.

Being invisible, he stepped to the side, allowing them to pass and stop next to him on the catwalk. Then they became nervous and promptly leapt over the railing and onto the level below.

Spike heard it as well. Much larger footsteps, arranged with a much more familiar gait. He looked up to see a tripod walking past him. It was not a battle tripod, though, but instead a technical one, the kind operated by flesh-thralls for limited applications such as ground-based tripod repairs or staging flyer unpacking and takeoff. Seeing one here, though, was unusual—and what it carried on its back far more so. There, in a geodesic cage, it held a Proto-Vandrare—and one most certainly not in a military uniform.

“Well, that’s strange,” said Spike to himself as he, still invisible, followed after it. Something was off, and he was liking the situation less by the second.

The half-living machine proceeded deeper into the facility, and the deeper it moved, the more Spike began to understand what this place was meant to be. It was indeed a power plant, and although the technology was primitive by Equestrian standards he still comprehended at least what most of it was meant to be. To his dismay, there appeared to be a strong possibility that this facility ran on some manner of nuclear power, perhaps on fission technology stolen from the archaic tripod mechs before they had superceeded the need for power at all. Which meant that this race of Proto-Vandrare was already standing at the precipice of causing its doom by self-induced nuclear annihilation. It was only a matter of time before they realized that there were far more profitable uses of the atom than for the peaceful generation of electrical potential.

By far his greater concern, though, was where the technical tripod was going. This question, unfortunately, was answered quite thoroughly when it passed into an enormous room. From the ceiling, Spike could see more cages of Proto-Vandrare. On the floor, he had found piles of desiccated corpses.

The tripod put its Proto-Vandrare away with no particular eye toward organization style, and Spike knelt down by one of the shriveled bodies. He whispered a spell and placed his hand over the wretched creature’s head, extending his magic into the remains and carefully pulling it back with new information. Curiously, there quantity of trauma was minimal. Not enough to cause death—and at the same time, the event of death had occurred far to recently to leave a corpse in this state of mummification. The spell was quite reliable, and yet Spike could not understand why it had died. It was as if its life had simply ceased.

And then, as he stood up, his question was answered. He watched as one of the tripods opened a cage and extracted a Proto-Vandrare. As it did, it extended an articulated proboscis, ramming down its victim’s throat. This, Spike found, was consistent with the injuries on the one he had inspected.

Then he saw the absolute last thing he wanted to see. A vibrant, glowing fluid was extracted upward and out of the Proto-Vandrare through the proboscis and loaded into the storage tanks of the drone. The body of the Proto-Vandrare faded and desiccated, and then, after it was fully depleted, was tossed away with the rest.

Spike understood what this meant, and what the creature had just done. And, worse, what they had apparently done to hundreds of Proto-Vandrare. The implications were terrifying, and Spike realized that in this instance it was imperative that he never know the answer to why they were doing this—and he also understood that it was his duty to discover that very reason.

So he followed, sidestepping the military Proto-Vandrare as they entered the room, doubtless to free the others of their species. It did not especially concern Spike at this point. In fact, their actions had never mattered except to themselves. For the Proto-Vandrare, the war had already been lost—but Spike now knew that something else was at play. Something far more threatening than anything he could have possibly predicted.

He spread his wings, taking flight after his quarry. Its gait was longer than his, but limited by the use of three legs; in flight, he could catch up with it easily and was able to follow it as it descended down a long shaft. Why it descended and where it was going remained unclear until he reached the bottom.

There, he found a chamber. Why the chamber had been built, he was not sure, nor did he care. What mattered was what had been assembled within it. Amongst the Proto-Vandrare containers of oil and compressed propane, he saw hundreds upon hundreds of the flesh constructs in technical tripods working on the construction of a vast and unauthorized project.

It was a ship. A small one, normally intended for automated use, about one thousandth the volume of the Iron Defender but quite capable of atmospheric or deep-space travel. It sat incomplete, assembled from Proto-Vandrare resources and powered by the very reactor that they had aped from the fallen tripods. As if the power plant they had built were a purpose-built factory for the assembly of Equestrian technology.

Its presence was unwelcome, and yet Spike found himself distinctly intrigued—and he elected to approach. Although, as he did, he suddenly stopped, sniffing the air. Something was off. Something peculiar. Something he remembered, a memory drawn back from the edge of time, of eons past. The smell of a Proto-Vandrare.

He diverted his path, moving between the equipment and piles of detritus left on the floor of the factory and discarded by the flesh-golems. Spike found it quickly. A primitive device strapped to a large propane vessel. Even with his limited knowledge of their technology, he comprehended that it was a bomb, and he extended a claw to sever the control mechanism—but he stopped himself.

Spike did not know what he was walking into. He did not know the risks, or what would happen inside that ship—and he did not want to carelessly destroy something he might need in the future.

He left the bomb alone. At least now he knew exactly how long he had to figure out what was going on—and should he fail, the problem would be taken care of regardless of his ultimate fate.

Entering through a hole in its lower surface, Spike landed and folded his wings neatly on his back. As he did, he deactivated his invisibility spell; there was no need for it here. The flesh constructs embedded on their utility tripods saw him, but he was the Grand Seneschal of the Equestrian military. They recognized him and did not bother to attack. Even if they had, it would have been only a minor inconvenience. Spike was far stronger than they were, even in oxygen.

He proceeded into the darkness of the unlit and incomplete ship. The halls built into it were vast; this type of vessel was not meant to hold an atmosphere, but instead for use by mechanized soldiers. This had long ago meant ponies with bodies configured for battle holding extractor rifles before progressing to tripod mechs and, eventually, to the modern system that Spike expected would rapidly suppressed the need for ground conflict at all. The ascetic affect of this prudent architectural form was a sense of vacuousness, of scale without weight. Spike had always found it to be a profoundly lonely thing.

The atmosphere had less oxygen. He cold smell sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide. It smelled like the air on Equestria. That only partially made sense. There was no reason to have that atmosphere on this planet. The only beings that strictly required it were, he supposed, the constructs; they had been built to survive the harsh environment of Equestria and he supposed they had been built to breath the native gas. Except that they were permanently sealed inside their mechs.

That question was answered when he approached an open gap wafting breathable gas from it. Pausing to check, Spike approached the precipice, holding onto the wall and staring into a vast pit. It was a type of hanger, at least on paper, meant for a type of ultra-large-scale tripod that had become obsolete nearly five hundred years prior. Except there were no tripods in this hole.

Down in the bottom, slithering through the fog and precipitation of their acid atmosphere, were the glossy-eyed creatures. Seemingly hundreds of them. And they were not alone. Interspersed amongst them were bodies. The desiccated husks of depleted Proto-Vandrare. As Spike watched, utility tripods arrived with cages full of corpses and dumped them into the pit on the far side. The constructs squeaked with pain and began to shamble toward the pile.

Spike was not sure what this was for or why it had been created until he looked closer and understood. He saw that they were changed. They did not eat, per se, but as the green creatures moved he saw arms, legs, and heads sticking from their bodies, occasionally twitching or clenching their fists as life was slowly restored to them. Spike saw the creatures growing fat as components of the dead merged to them until they violently split open, dividing into two of themselves.

“Well...that explains were all these guys came from,” he said to himself. It was a thought he had never considered and, as gross as it was, something of distinct utility. These creatures had been created from the flesh of the last of Equestria’s animals, but they themselves were neither alive nor dead. They were animated by necromancy powered by the Alicorn but utilized no continuous connection. Fed dead flesh, that dead flesh became them. On a diet of dead Proto-Vandrare, even ones devoid of Milk, they could reproduce.

As intriguing as it was, these creatures were capable only of intelligence, not volition. They had no souls. They were just machines made out of tissue. Which meant someone was controlling them.

One passed Spike in a tripod. Even from a distance, he could sense the reek of Milk. It was headed where he needed to go, and he followed it toward whatever he might find. He knew that time was short.

The door opened into a large room, and Spike paused. He was familiar with this type of ship. He had designed them. He knew the plans like he knew the back of his own spines—and this room was not on any of the schematics he had built. This place was new.

There was little light, but the tripod continued off toward wherever it needed to go. Spike did not follow but entered the room slowly, waiting for his eyes to adjust.

Then they did, and he saw what he needed to see. What he supposed he might have expected, but something he had not allowed himself to consider.

The pentagram had already been assembled, the floor carved by magic into delicately forged runes that were now illuminated by soft pink glow. At each of four vertices, heavy extraction cannons had been disassembled, their internal gates torn out and reconfigured to a system of old and decrepit-looking rubber cables and conduits, things that had been salvaged from the Proto-Vandrare power plant. Equipment that they had built aping Equestrian technology taken and now merged back into that very same technology in a way that was never supposed to be attempted.

One vertex was different. One vertex where the cables and conduits converged. Spike knew what sat on that vertex. How long he had stared at that box. How well he knew every inch of its surface—that surface now drilled and cut to allow for the insertion of so many cables and tubes.

The tripod approached one of the extractors and extended its proboscis, regurgitating the Milk it had pulled directly from a Proto-Vandrare and inserting it into the machine. The modified extractor hummed to life, its pumps roaring as it processed and forced the Milk through the machine and across the pentagram. The construct cried out as its body suddenly began to shrivel, and it struggled against the unexpected agony—but it could not escape the tripod meant to imprison it. It died in pain, collapsing to dust, and its empty tripod fell with the others.

“Spike,” said Fleur, softly. She sounded sick, or extremely tired.

“Fleur, I--”

Spike approached, only to be knocked back by a sudden shock of energy. Of a familiar magic he had felt so many times before blocking his path.

“I had hoped you would not need to see this,” she said. “But I should have known, no? You would come. To save me. It was only a matter of time. So...pherhaps...zis is better? Zis way?Yes...zis way, you will understand. Understand what must be done...”

Spike pushed hard against the magical barrier, the machines casting it straining against his force but still managing to resist him.

"Fleur! You don't understand what you're doing, if the runes break--you have to stop this! PLEASE!"

Spike did not have a chance to stop her. The machines activated at once, the runes igniting with Fleur’s light. Brilliant red fluid flushed through the tubes, racing through them to her box and pouring into it, the machines igniting and melting, unable to withstand the force of the material they were attempting to purify, the fragments of extractor beams and makeshift purification centrifuges spinning to full power and roaring as they performed they were forced to perform the ritual.

“FLEUR, NO!”

It was too late. The Milk flowed into the container, the sudden surge of magical force immediately shattering the connection to the runes. Spike heard Fleur scream in agony, and then suddenly stop as the runes flashed brightly and then vanished entirely. As the necromancy keeping her soul tied to her body was lost.

And yet it continued to flow. The red fluid, drawn from the machines and forced inside—and Spike could not manage to turn away. He wished he could have, but he could not make himself do so. He could not give up on her, even though she could hardly comprehend the severity of what she had just done.

He forced his hands forward, deep into the field. The machines casting it sparked and resisted against the strain, but he pushed harder, driving his arms through it entirely and charring away the flesh that covered them. The sheer force of it was too much for the machines to bear, and they erupted in plumes of energy and molten metal, allowing Spike to stumble through, falling to the floor. He caught himself, his skin and flesh already reassembling to its normal state. Within seconds, his arms had fully regenerated and he rushed to the box--but it was too late.

Then it stopped. The red light dimmed, and all was still. Then box sat, empty, silent, and smoking. The glow of the runes had ceased, the spells having been broken--and only the light of the Alicorn crystal illuminating the metal as it began to rust and corrode in the toxic atmosphere.

Then it opened with a hiss.

A skeletal, half-formed hoof, its surface covered with only the barest fraction of dead flesh—but it pulled on the edge of her cage, drawing the body connected to it out.

Her horn emerged first, followed by her head. Her teeth, still exposed, gnashed at the air, and she gurgled and spat before suddenly bursting out coughing. The tubes were connected to holes drilled in the rear of her skull and what remained of her cervical spine—hoses that still held the barest splatters of red fluid on their interior surface.

The mummified gray-brown skin of her face began to rejuvenate, spreading in patches as it once again became light and once again filled with life. Shaking, the corpse pulled itself fully out of the tank and splatted to the floor. A head and part of a spine, rapidly extending behind it, a single front leg fully formed and another one already jutting out of a cartilaginous shoulder.

The skin extended, covering bone as new flesh and new organs formed. A heart formed in her chest and started to beat, perfusing her flesh with blood for the first time. She coughed hard and spat formaldehyde, metal, and fixed lung tissue onto the floor before taking a single long breath.

Then she stood. Her back legs had already formed. She was wobbling and barely able to stand, but she still turned toward Spike, the black eyeless holes of her face boring into him, the rear of the shadows already beginning to be painted by spreading, exposed retinas. Then she started to walk.

It came quickly. With ever step, new skin covered her, white and perfect. Her mane and tail emerged in clumps, then all at once, assuming their natural pink color and growing quickly to their full length. Luminescent red fluid dripped from her eye sockets and then, with a blink, lenses formed over the exposed retinas, then irises, and final complete new eyes that had been assembled in seconds. The implanted connectors in the rear of her head came out with a pop, ejected by the repairs to her skull.

Taking another breath, she regained her composure and stood tall. She stopped walking and smiled. There, before Spike, was Fleur De’Lis, a tall and beautiful unicorn.

Spike felt his heart breaking. “Fleur...what have you done?”

“I wish I could have told you,” she said, sadly. “To have explained my plans. But you would have tried to stop me. Your loyalty, it is simply to great. And your fear that I would fail. And I could not allow zat.”

“You’re...”

“Alive? Yes. I have had...much time to realize how to do it. How little Milk it would require. Only that of a few of these creatures. Barely a measurable fraction of their population. Twilight will not miss a few drops.”

“But...but why?”

“Why?” she looked up at him, as if confused by the question. “Why? You ask me why? Why I took steps to restore myself to life?”

“We saved you--”

“You saved a corpse. Tell me, Spike, do you know what it feels like to be dead? It is not cold. It is not hot, either. No. You feel nothing. No physical sensation. You see nothing. Hear nothing. Like floating, in nothing...but the spells, zey keep you zere. Not alive. Not dead. Trapped in...in zat awful hell. Were I cannot be...and yet Were I must be.” She stepped closer to him. “Were I can sense you, but not see you. Not touch you. Not hold you, as I once did. Even when I had a false body...but now I feel. I breathe. And you are here with me once again.”

Spike knelt down and ran his fingers through her mane and down her back. She was warm. Alive. In a state that no pony had ever been in in so long. Not linked to an artificial body, or held as an enchanted corpse in a tank—but truly alive. Truly a pony.

He held her close. “Fleur...”

“I did zis for us.” She laughed, pulling her head back and prancing around the room. “Zis new body! Zis ship! I have made it, for us!”

Spike smiled, mind racing. “What are we supposed to do with a drone ship?”

Fleur stopped and laughed. “What to do? What to do? Did you ever stop to think how big these universes that we harvest truly are? That there are hundreds, millions of worlds where we might dwell? Among others, or on a world of our own, alone and together for the remainder of our time? Where we do not need to fight a war to survive, where we do not need to live that life? Where we can leave it behind us?” She laughed, only pausing at an apparent twinge in her jaw. Something not quite right about her teeth.

Spike nodded and stroked her mane. “That sounds nice, doesn’t it?”

Fleur smiled her large, beautiful smile at him. Her eyes were alight with life and so brilliant, like a pair of jewels. Then something rose to the surface of that smile. A strange expression of confusion. A tremor ran through her body, and she coughed slightly. Red fluid ran from the corners of her mouth.

“Fleur?”

“Is nothing. Is zis planet. I have not breathed in...longer than I can remember.” She winced and shook her head violently. As she turned, Spike could already see the lesions forming on her body. The tumors that were already spreading.

"We will be together," she insisted. "I am...I am alive again. I am back. I can see you, I am not alone, I am not ashamed that you can...can see...see me..." She coughed again, this time more violently. A look of fear began to cross her face. Fear at the feeling and realization that something had gone horribly wrong with that cough. That something inside her had changed suddenly and relentlessly.

“What is...what is happening?”

Spike already knew. Knew what Fleur could not have known. She had learned enough to extract it, to halfway purify it, but she did not know the nightmare she had so willingly injected into herself. He, though knew, and he could almost not bear to tell her that her fate had already been sealed.

Fleur shook her head again, backing toward her machinery and bumping into the tank that had been her home for three centuries. She cried out in pain.

“Why—why does zis hurt? I don’t—I don’t understand! The Milk, my body, I have my body back! I WILL NOT LET IT GO!” She looked to Spike, her expression filled with abject fear, tears flowing from her eyes, her mouth dripping silver and filled with so many extra teeth. “Please, not now, not while I am so close! Spike what—what is happening to me?!”

Spike looked at the ground, but forced himself to meet her terrified eyes.

“The Milk,” he said, solemnly. “It’s pure, refined life force. But not just life, potential. And no mortal being can withstand the effects of direct exposure to it.”

“What does—what does that mean? Spike, what does that mean!”

Spike looked away. He could not meet her eyes, their irises already beginning to shift and change. He tried to retain his composure, but he knew what he was about to see, and his mind was racing. Trying to find a way to reverse it. The exposure would not be fatal. The effects were much, much worse.

“Spike! SPIKE! Talk to me, please, I’m scared, I don’t know what’s—what’s--”

She suddenly screamed out in pain as the lesions ruptured, tearing themselves open to expose the teeth inside them that gnashed as the new mouths opened up, their throats boring into her and linking to her newly differentiating organs. Other holes split and separated, violet eyes opening on her neck and along her spine, most sighted bust some blind, their irises dividing into multiple compound segments.

Her eyes widened as she could suddenly see. “No! NO NO NO!”

She took a sudden step to the side and screamed. Instead of moving, the flesh of one of her rear legs separated, peeling her hoof in half and reconfiguring it into a complex claw, planting it on the floor to stabilize her as the skin regenerated and new muscle and bone formed on both the original leg and the new one. Fleur looked down at it, horrified, and screamed.

“SPIKE!”

Spike reached out to grab her. She held him back, turning her head so sharply that it fragmented, broadening and splitting, reforming itself but leaving a trail of teeth and bone spreading and differentiating, slicing through her blistering skin. Her vocal cords were split in the process, and all she could produced was terrified gurgling as she stared up at him, her eyes swelling as new eyes formed within them.

Her body reconfigured, spiracles opening linked to new vocal organs.

“What—I can’t—It hurts—it hurts so much!”

She pushed herself off Spike, her legs collapsing and the flesh merging into a pair of more sturdy, longer legs. Her hooves fractured, bending into hands.

“No, no! Not again, not this!”

She tried to run, her newfound arms linking themselves harder to the ground--and she dismembered herself. Her body split, her spine and organs drawing free of her body, with every inch a new segment growing and splitting forth into bone and muscle that forced itself into a set of skittering, insect-like legs that carried her forward as she tried to flee herself, only for new skin and new organs to cover her as the rest pulled its way forward back to her escaping front-half. Unable to flee, she wept at the sight of herself as she compiled back into cohesive, immortal flesh, her own thousands of toothed eyes and partial heads staring back at her as she moved. She swelled, her flesh suddenly tearing and bursting as she exploded onto the floor, her organs each forming their own claws through the mass of sinew and ever-living, screaming tissues, all attempting to draw herself forward. Forward, to Spike.

“The extractors!” screamed her numerous mouths as she formed tentacles, slithering outward. “Get it out of me, get it out!”

Spike knelt down and held her. “We can’t. The thermal effect, you’ll burn to death!”

He looked around, desperately trying to come up with a solution. She was not wrong; the extractors could, in theory, save her—but they were not designed for that and there was no time to modify them. What his eyes stopped on, though, was the Alicorn crystal. The one she had abandoned. The one she no longer needed.

He let go of her and grabbed it, tearing it free form her sarcophagus. He lit his fire and prepared a spell.

“But the extractors aren’t the only way!” he said, standing over her and casting a magic circle in the air. “It’s life force, pure life force, there’s an easier way to get it out, and I’m sorry. But if I kill you, the Alicorn will preserve you until I can get you back in a tank--the necromancy, I can keep you intact--”

A horrid piping gurgle escaped the infinity differentiating lump of bones and organs that had once been Fleur, and her tentacles curled up, suddenly erupting in plumes of clear cellulose spines and nematocysts—then, as they ossified, she screamed as barbed bone-spikes shot through her flesh.

Her neck extended, forming new bones and new joints as her jaw dislocated and opened far wider than it should. Her eyes were wide but no sound came out, even as she opened her mouth to scream and her teeth extended as violent points before rupturing into crawling flesh of exposed nerve and leaf-like apertures. Her overly long neck snapped, flopping to the side, and she vomited her organs, her intestines fountain upward in a plume and forming bones and skin and a new mane as they differentiated into a single long, four-elbowed arm and several new heads. The hand’s three fingers grasped Spike’s wrist.

“No!” she wept from one of the heads. It looked up at her. It looked almost like the face of a Proto-Vandrare--And she saw this in him, tears and Milk dripping from her split eyes, the teeth of her pupils gnashing holes in her corneas as her dreams were crushed. “No! please...”

“It’s the only way to save you!”

“I won’t go back, I can’t! Please!”

“Fleur, I have to stop it before it can’t be reversed--”

She shook her head and closed her eyes, forcing part of one of her heads to be almost like the beautiful face she had once had. She smiled to him, tears of flesh pouring out from her eyes. Eyes that were no longer afraid, but so very sad.

“Please! If you ever loved me, grant me this one wish. I...tried but I...” She shuddered, her face sinking back into herself as she continued to change, more legs springing out from her and new manes developing at various points on her body, erupting from between the teeth of her drooling, gibbering mouths. “It was wrong, it was always wrong. Please. Let me...just let me go. I’m sorry. Don’t...don’t force me. Please don’t force me. I don’t want it. Just...just let me die, Spike. I’m sorry.”

She burst into tears, and Spike held out the spell and the crystal—but he could not bring himself to do it. He instead relaxed his hand and, instead of casting the death spell, took the hand that had emerged from her, holding it tight and lowering himself to her. She stared at him in awe, her will and love forcing the mass of flesh, tentacles, bone and limb around him.

“The Proto-Vandrare planted a bomb,” he said.

“Then you need to escape. But I...won’t. I can’t. But I can’t lose you...”

“No. I’m not leaving you. I’ll be right here. I know it’s scary, but you’re going to be alright. It’s going to be okay. I’m here.”

Fleur looked up at him, and forced herself to smile.

“How strange,” she said. “Zat you do not cry. Because...I Zink you understand zat zis is..it is right. Thank you, Spike. Goodbye, my love.”

Somewhere in the facility, a bomb attached to an abandoned propane tank exploded. The tank burst, and the effect occurred within less than a second. The reaction was dramatic and sudden, consuming both the Proto-Vandrare reactor and the incomplete reactor of the drone ship. In a single, sudden flash brighter than the sun, the two nuclear reactors erupted with the force of nine hundred thousand tons of TNT, vaporizing everything instantaneously.

There was a pause. A long moment as the force dissipated, as the cloud of fire became a cloud of smoke and debris. A moment not of silent, but of a firestorm dissipating, the energy within it dying and fading outward.

Then Spike stood up. In his right hand, he still held Fleur’s hand, and it crumbled to ash in his grasp. Nothing remained of her but dust with no chance of regeneration. Her wish had been granted.

Spike looked to his other hand. He still held the Alicorn crystal, its indestructible violet surface as polished and undamaged as it had been since Twilight had birthed it. Spike himself, likewise, was unharmed, the force of nuclear fire trivial against the scales of a draconic wizard. Fate had decreed that Fleur alone would die. Spike took a breath of radioactive air and realized that it was him who was now alone. Now and forever. She had escaped, but left him behind.

A voice came to him, devoid of interference.

“Spike? Spike, what happened? Roseluck just got ejected, I need confirmation--”

Spike did not bother answering. He raised his hand, drawing his fire around it and casting a familiar spell. Space around him bend with a pop as he stepped forward and onto the bridge of the Iron Defender.

“--that you didn’t get blown to...to...” Shining looked up. “There you are. What happened to your clothes?”

Spike said nothing but effortlessly changed his spell, placing his claw over his armor and casting a spell that caused them to regenerate within a matter of seconds.

Shining Armor immediately understood that something was very wrong. “Spike?”

Spike held out his hand—and Shining’s eyes widened at the sight of a severed Alicorn crystal.

“Spike, please tell me that she—she isn’t—“ He looked up at him. “Is that...Fleur?”

Spike nodded.

“But she...” His eye stared at the crystal. “But there’s...there’s never been a true-death. Not ever. The number of ponies, they’re exactly the same as when Twilight first became princess.”

“Except for Applebloom. For now.”

Shining Armor seemed confused. “What happened?”

Spike took a long breath and stared down at the crystal. It felt strange in his hand. Warm, but not from the nuclear blast. Warm and cooling. As if the life were escaping it—but not as though it were dead. As if it were still liable to start squirming in his hand at any moment. Dead, but incapable of death. A conduit of immortality waiting for its next victim. It was a fragment of the Alicorn. The Alicorn that was fed a continuous, unending diet of Milk. Life, or what they called life, was simply a controlled version of what Spike had just witnessed happening to Fleur. Controlled by Twilight.

“There was nothing to eject,” he said at last.

“Excuse me?”

“They took her down. A direct hit. Something went wrong. The feedback...it must have fried her runes. She...separated.”

“She died.”

Spike nodded. “They had her in a facility. What was left of her. It’s gone now. This is all that’s left. I’m sorry about Roseluck’s mech.”

“It’s fine, she’s fine, but...Fleur...”

Spike nodded. “I know.”

Shining Armor paused, a horrified expression spreading over what remained of his face. “And I...I was...oh Celestia, it’s my fault, isn’t it?”

“You couldn’t have known.”

“NO, no, I could have, I was the one who signed the exemption, I was the one who...who...” His jaw clenched around the tubes shoved down his throat. “I...I’m responsible! I did this! I...Spike, I’m...I don’t know if...I can’t...”

Spike shook his head and put the crystal in a small pouch on his belt. “Don’t beat yourself up over it, Shining. She was already dead. And we still have a job to do.”

Author's Note

Perhaps volition can only be perceived through sheer blindness to the intersection of the self-evident cycles.

Chapter 8: The Beautiful One

The planet below revolved slowly, the fires of their cities fading from sight as another day dawned below. Spike watched it pass in silence.

It hurt. But not in the way he had expected. Instead, he felt a strange kind of relief—and that, in turn, made him feel far worse than the sadness alone. He had understood it would be hard, but understood why it had become necessary—but if he allowed himself to believe that then he was the one at fault. The one who had created the situation in the first place. No action he had taken or could have taken could have been the correct one. For the first time, he felt free to fully commit to the one path forward that was necessary, his mind free of doubts—and yet he wished as hard as he could that there was another way.

A voice came from behind him.

“Spike?” asked Shining Armor, quietly.

“Is it ready?”

“All tests indicate that the Soichet Ring is prepped and operational. The blast range is cleared.”

“The manifolds?”

“Clear, and the insulation coils are all intact. I’m ready to activate them on your order. Everything is ready. We can begin the harvest. Just say the word.”

Spike paused, staring at the planet. The planet where Fleur had died twice.

“Spike?”

“I know, Shining. What is the situation on the ground?”

“Phase two. Their forces were diverted to minor cities, and we’re currently leveling the one where they kept their central command.”

“The Island City. New York. How much of it is removed?”

“Not more than they could theoretically rebuild. It isn’t a concerted harvesting operation like last time. I’ve organized them to cause maximal chaos and destruction.”

“Discord would be proud, wouldn’t he?”

“Of this? No, Spike. He would hate us. Chaos is supposed to be fun. This is just sort of...sad, I guess. I think that might be why he left.”

Spike nodded slowly in agreement. “Was there any interference with the ground operation?”

“No. The Proto-Vandrare forces never engaged. They were too busy trying to purge the decoy forces out of North America. A.R.E.S. never even got off the continent.”

Spike examined the readings and slowly tapped something onto the control console. He knew the system so well that he could enter instructional commands almost as well as Shining Armor, with such precision that Shining Armor himself could not even notice the adjustments. “Then the war is over. We won. It’s time to retract the ground forces.”

“And the flesh-drones?”

“Leave them to defend. I know a way to make more.”

“If we even need more. I have a good feeling about this. All my readings indicate that this planet is especially rich in Milk. Who knows? It might be the last one we need. In fact, I'm sure of it.”

“Then I’ll buy you a round of cider once we get you back in your body.”

“In memory of...”

Spike looked over his shoulder, and Shining looked away.

“...in the memory of everything we’ve lost.”

Spike nodded and turned back to the view of the planet. From high above, it seemed so quiet. So utterly silent. Peaceful, even.

“I’m retracting all ponies. Flyers will stay linked. Recalling tripods...” Shining paused. A light clicked on on Spike’s control board.

“What is that?”

“Something’s wrong.”

“Wrong? Shining, that’s the last thing I want to hear, not when we’re so close to going home.”

“An ejector failed.”

“Another? That’s supposed to be impossible, and now it’s happened twice in one run?” Which was of course false. It had, in fact, never happened before. Fleur had shut hers down. She was one of the few with enough knowledge to disconnect it.

“Tripod 877D3pE-gamma, cross referencing...” A large sigh escaped him.

“What?”

Shining’s horn lit, filling the air around him with holograms. Spike approached, and when he saw the image of the pony now trapped planet-side, he sighed as well.

“Because of course it’s her's...”

The image staring back was not staring at him, but rather in two directions, and while most of the ID images had serious, tired looking ponies, Derpy had clearly not understood that fact and been smiling broadly as if it were a school picture.

“Where is she?”

“In the worst possible place she could be. She’s in the middle of New York.”

Spike felt a sudden sense of sickness creeping into his gut. His hand was shaking, held over the controls. “Can you contact her?”

“Not through the normal channel, her gate failed, but...I’m connecting to an auxiliary channel, hold on...”

“Why is it taking so long?”

“Because I normally only use it with you, and you’re not a pony. Dragon brains are much less prone to exploding when I focus my entire concentration through the transmitter!”

“Then at least get me occulus focus on the position.”

Shining Armor obliged. The empty space of the bridge filled with an image of the city as seen through the eyes of a fragment of Shining’s astral self. Spike was surprised at how much damage his soldiers had been able to accomplish. Buildings were broken in various ways, collapsing and burning, and someone had torn the head off a large statue that was inexplicably holding a massive minigun.

Tiny holographic models of flyers flew by, and at his knees, Spike saw the image of the Proto-Vandrare troops in their bulky, unarmored mechs marching through the streets.

He immediately understood the plan of the city, and the directions they were moving—and the fact that they were converging on a lone mech. Because of course they were.

“This isn’t good. Shining, she’s cornered, we need to get her out of there.”

“I’m trying, I need to reroute power, I can’t get the gate back online!”

The communication channel suddenly activated and Spike became aware of the fact that he was linked—mainly because of the sudden squeak of mental overload that came across a great distance from the planet below.

“EEK! My brains!”

“At least she didn’t explode,” sighed Shining Armor.

“Captain? Is that you? I can hear you, but I can’t see you. Are you hiding?”

“I’m on the ship, Derpy. You need to eject. NOW.”

“Oh, I don’t think I can. The door’s broken. I think I’m locked in. This happens a lot to me. And there’s a lot of dudes down here. And they look very angry.” She was getting increasingly concerned. Spike saw the hologram of her tripod, now fully trapped.

“Your ejector is broken. You need to get out of there.”

“I can’t, they’re on every side and they’re—oh now, they’re shooting at me! Why are they being so mean? I—I just don’t know what went wrong!”

Shining looked to Spike. Spike understood.

He began the spell. “Derpy, I’m casting a teleportation spell, but it’s not the same type to move myself—Shining, I need coordinate codes, NOW—it will take some time, I need you to hold them off as long as you can--”

The codes appeared around him, and Spike began the advanced mental-math necessary to form the teleport. It was indeed going to be harder than he thought. This was a spell he had never attempted to achieve before, at least not for small objects from across a room. Small, nonliving objects.

“Spike? I can hear you, but I can’t see you, are you hiding--”

A sudden burst of energy and a cry of confusion.

“She’s hit.”

Shining’s eye widened. “The flyers, I’m trying to get them in, but there’s too much air support, I can’t get them past the airships!”

“Buy me more time, Shining.”

“I can’t hold them off!” squeaked Derpy. “I’m sorry! I’ve messed everything up! Please tell my daughters I’m—I’m so sorry—”

“SHINING!”

Shining’s eye darted around the room, then closed.

“There’s an unfinished drone ship in the bay. I’m sending the activation code. That’s all I’ve got short of orbital bombardment.”

“It will be enough—Derpy, hold on, I’m almost there—”

“I can’t—I can’t—”

There was a sudden explosion, and a dull pain that crept through Spike’s head as Derpy died. Shining, though, being a pony, screamed in pain and horror—which came out as distorted static through the system linked to his brain.

Spike responded with reflexes he did not know he even had. He ignored the terminal parts of the spell, the parts meant to keep her alive, and rammed his hand through space and into the fire of her burning ship, his claw crushing through bone and tearing flesh from steel.

He fell back, a plume of fire bursting into the room through his portal and Derpy falling from his claw onto the ground, bouncing once and leaving a trail of charred skin and blood. Spike’s skin, damaged from the malformed spell, had already started to regenerate—but Derpy did not. She could not. Not anymore.

There had been no choice. She had not survived the teleportation, and all that survived was a smoking skull, the exposed spine having been ripped from its housing. Her eyes had boiled and her mane was falling out from the few places it remained. Most of the skin had departed, revealing the bone beneath that cracked from the heat of the blast. Her Alicorn crystal had remained on the planet below, now surely sitting in the ash and molten liquid that had once been her mechanical body.

“I’m not—I’m not receiving brain waves,” said Shining, his voice wavering. “Oh Celestia, not again—”

“But the brain’s boiled but still intact,” said Spike, kneeling beside her and reaching into his belt—and feeling his claws close around Fleur’s Alicorn crystal.

Without hesitating, he drew it and brought it down on Derpy’s severed head, driving it through her skull and directly into the center of her brain. At this point, the brain damage was hardly a concern; the brain was not strictly necessary. The Alicorn could sustain a pony, even if all that remain was a few flecks of skin or some feathers. So long as the spell was correct.

Spike raised his hand and cast the spell, the green fire assembling before him in a circle of luminescent magic.

“Spike, no!” screamed Shining. “You can’t—”

Spike did not stop. He braced himself and contorted the spell. Corrupting it. Watching as the green fire turned to yellow, then red, and as it assumed an all-too orderly symbol. He watched as the pentagram formed, and as he carved the first of the demonic icons from Fleur’s box the rest began to assemble themselves, drawn by a different hand on the far side of reality.

The effect was immediate and agonizing, and in that instant, Spike realized what he had never before understood. Of the mercy he had truly granted Fleur, and of the atrocity he was about to commit on the pony before him. But it was too late. Once started, the spell could not be stopped. The Alicorn had already taken control. No pony was permitted to die. Immortality was mandatory, even if it meant shoving a damaged soul back into a corpse and sealing it there with the darkest possible magic. Twilight could not allow them to die. She could not allow her kingdom to fade. She could not allow ponies to come to harm, no matter the horrors they were exposed to in the process of ensuring their longevity.

Spike tried to scream, but felt no air. It was as though the marrow of his hand was boiling, the bones snapping in some unholy fire. The world swam, and the universe around him bent in ways that should have been impossible, straight lines suddenly seeming curved and angles no longer obeying normal channels of geometry. He became aware that he was not alone, and had never been alone.

She looked at him from across the room, and she smiled. How red her eyes were, and how beautiful her yellow skin seemed in the light of the demonic spell. As her mouth opened, Spike realized that he recognized her teeth. So many black, ichthyan teeth. A mouth that stretched across the whole of everything with the barest smile, and a pair of jaws that Spike now felt closing around his neck, penetrating him, never to free him—jaws that had truly been around him for his whole life.

The room was filled with the scent of carnations, their spicy sweet scent corrupted in a way that could not easily be described, as if they had started to rot deep under something that was not quite water.

The soul returned as vomited bile, screaming in a silent language as it was dragged across false-angles and nonsensical expanses of space through the long infinity of a finite room. Spike’s spell pulled it in in a spiral, tearing away the pieces that would no longer fit in its new vessel and converting them into something like Milk. Like Milk, but more true. More clearly the aspect of which it was meant to contain. Its mirror, reflecting in itself the mutual falsehoods of both. The things Spike had thought he had known, but could not truly see without having seen it as it truly was.

The soul, broken and cut to size, was forced back into the body, and Spike felt the Alicorn take it, locking it back into its cage of burned flesh. He had forced Derpy to survive, and she would now be eternal, as all of them would be soon enough.

The spell shattered, knocking him back. He slammed into a set of equipment, crying out in pain, not from his back but from his hand. He lifted it up and saw that it was horribly burned—and that these burns were not healing. Rather, new woulds were opening. The glowing outlines of demonic icons that began to slowly spread up his arm before darkening in their permanence. Wounds that did not heal, but that closed in foul, infinite malignancy.

“SPIKE!” cried Shining.

Derpy moved. Her burned, eyeless skull opened its mouth, as if to scream, but there was no air. She had no lungs, and her trachea was open on both sides. The head and spine, though, began to twitch and writhe. Not on her own muscular power, but on the residual effects of having a mockery of industrially-purified life-force pushed back into her remains.

A pair of nurses arrived and Spike stood up, hiding his hand. “Get her a formaldehyde perfusion, stat! Before the decay sets in! She needs a support tank!”

“We don’t have—”

“But Equestria does! Get her back, and find Sparkler and Dinky! Get her home! Hurry, you don’t have much time!”

They agreed, quickly picking up the still-smoldering head and placing it in a specialized temporarily sarcophagus. Then they were quickly off, taking her away.

Shining, his lungs inflating and deflating rapidly, suddenly let out a long sigh.

“Those...those monsters...”

“I know,” said Spike. He examined his hand. It still worked, and it still hurt. He supposed it always would. But it had been necessary.

“You should get that looked at.”

“There’s nothing they can do,” he said. “It looks like I’m special today. The first dragon in twenty seven million years to perform necromancy.”

“I...didn’t know you could...”

“I’ve been around Fleur long enough to see how she operates. The same way she learned from me.” He paused. “Operated.” He paused again, a sudden horrific realization coming to his mind.

“There are...hundreds of dead ponies,” he said, more to himself than Shining. “And Twilight...she sees that all the time, doesn’t she?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

An alarm sounded. Spike and Shining Armor both looked to the map of the city, which was still being projected.

“What’s happening now?”

Shining’s eye moved quickly across the cityscape, although he was seeing something that Spike could not. “The drone ship. It’s launching.”

“Then stop it. We don’t need it anymore. She was the last. We’ve evacuated the planet. We can stop killing them now.”

“I...I can’t.”

“What do you mean you ‘can’t’? Turn it off. NOW.”

“I can’t. It was an incomplete construction. I could start it, but...I’m no longer in control. I can’t turn it back off.”

“What does that mean, then?” asked Spike, calmly.

“It means it will complete its firing run automatically.”

Spike looked down at the map. He saw the small ship rise from the water, dwarfing the fascist-looking statue in the bay and hovering for a moment before proceeding inward, firing its forward extractor cannon and causing mass-destruction across the already battered and largely depopulated city.

“You could destroy it with an orbital strike.”

“I could. But the entire city would be vaporized in the blast radius. There are still two million of them down there. I can't justify the loss of that much Milk. I’m sorry. There’s nothing we can do.”

They watched the hologram silently drift across the city. The tiny models of the Proto-Vandrare airships opened fire with weak, backward weapons, tearing pieces off the drone ship; it had been launched before its armor could actually be assembled or magically charged. And yet it continued, piloted by the mindless flesh-golems that had been permanently ingrained into its structure. Things that could not think but that were likely consumed with both an endless rage and a desire to die.

One of the Proto-Vandare ships erupted in a plume of flame. The other charged forward, firing its weapon and taking heavy damage. Spike and Shining watched in silence as it approached in a final head-on charge, firing its full thrust, not from an automated system but from hundreds of living Proto-Vandrare working in unison. Together.

Then, together, they rammed it into the derelict drone ship. The effect was immediate as both vessels exploded, the fission reactor of the drone erupting in a plume of nuclear fire. Both fell, destroyed and defeated.

Spike and Shining Armor watched them fall, and then stared at the tiny holographic representation of the flames on the ground where both had struck. Neither needed to state that there had obviously been no survivors.

“They...sacrificed themselves,” said Shining Armor at last.

“To destroy an unfinished ship launched in error,” added Spike.

“They don’t know that. And they never will. It doesn’t matter to us if they’re deaths were pointless, to the people down there, they must look like heroes. And I guess they are.”

“To die pointlessly?”

“No. To die trying to save others. To have...an honorable death. To die a hero. I mean...that’s something none of us will ever know, isn’t it? That’s the one thing ponies can never do.”

“Fleur did.”

Shining opened his mouth as if to say something, but closed it.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose she did. I guess she’s lucky. Just like they were, down there. Sort of makes you think, doesn’t it?”

“No,” said Spike. “Not really.”

Author's Note

Morality governs what ought to be done, but not what can be done, and never what must be done.

Chapter 9: The Hero

The holograms had grown so thick and numerous that they almost seemed real, rendered in the pale blue light of Shining Armor’s magic. A crowd of translucent Proto-Vandrare had filled the bridge, the blurred remnants of still-smoldering buildings in the background making Spike seem that he was almost among them, staring up at a stage as a man in round glasses gave a rousing speech, proclaiming victory and other things that had a very different meaning to him than they did to Spike.

Spike looked to his side. Emerging from the crowd, surrounded by the images of the wide-eyed bipeds, stood Shining Armor, his half-stripped head floating in his tube, Spike at his side.

“It’s time,” he said. “I will start at your order.”

“No,” said Spike. He held out his claw. “I’ll pull the trigger.”

Shining Armor’s eye slowly drifted to Spike. His head, being bolted in place, could not turn; he no longer even possessed all but the most rudimentary remnants of a neck.

“Revenge won’t help you,” he said. “It won’t make it better.”

“It isn’t revenge,” said Spike, facing his brother—and his closest living friend. “You know what it means. What it does.”

“I know. I can handle the burden.”

“No. You can’t. Because when they’re back, I want you to be able to look Flurry in the eyes. Give me control. I’ll do it.”

Shining Armor hesitated, but acquiesced. “Thank you,” he said, his magic tracing lines into the space over Spike’s left palm, magic forming itself into solid matter. Spike’s claw closed around a fully assembled detonator.

With the claw of his thumb, he flipped the translucent cap open, exposing a pleasantly large red button. Even now, Shining Armor seemed to have a sense of humor.

Spike looked up at the hologram of the man in round glasses as he gesticulated and spoke about things that no longer mattered, his voice carrying across space through Shining Armor’s mind.

“--Mankind is coming, and A.R.E.S. will lead the way!” This was followed by rousing cheers. The hope of a whole world, in the relief and glory of their clear victory.

“It’s funny,” said Spike. “They never even asked. Never questioned it once.”

“Asked what?”

“What we actually came for.”

He brought his thumb down on the button.

Across the entirety of Earth, the Extractor suddenly activated. Individual units, hundreds of them, placed across the laylines of the planet. While A.R.E.S. had been defending the cities of the continent and country they deemed most valuable, the actual operation had been conducted elsewhere: in the jungles of South America, the vast grasslands of Africa, the steppe of Siberia, the plateaus of India, the icy wastes of Antarctica and northern Canada. No one had even tried to stop them. They had never even bothered to consider the possibility that they were deceived.

On the surface, every Proto-Vandrare suddenly stopped as a strange sensation overtook them. They paused, not in pain and not in discomfort, but just slightly confused. Then the cells of every living thing on the planet ruptured, broken down on a molecular level as their Milk was drawn out and directed upward to the sky, toward the Iron Defender’s forward antenna. Their bodies collapsed to dust, the entirety of the planet sterilized to fuel the Alicorn. It ultimately only took a matter of seconds.

“Hold on,” said Shining Armor. “You might want to brace yourself. This is about to get hairy.”

Spike grasped the metal of the ship with one hand as the wave hit. The entire life force of a planet: ever animal, every plant, every fungus, and every bacterial cell, but most importantly the combined effluvium of nearly two billion Proto-Vandrare.

The Iron Defender shook as it channeled the force through it, immediately superheating from the sheer strain of carrying that much magical force. The flesh-golems screamed in pain as their bodies boiled and burst, then disintegrated into charcoal. The ponies, though, remained safe; they had been returned to Equestria or sealed in specialized chambers that insulated them from the blast. The bridge, of course, had not, because there was no need to. Shining Armor’s tube was resistant to thermal damage, having been designed specifically for this purpose, and even as the atmosphere suddenly increased to several thousand degrees he remained cool and unaffected. Spike was likewise unaffected, although not from any particular insulation effect; rather, he was simply a dragon. The the extreme heat had no effect on his biology. It was, though, the first time he had actually felt hot in a long time without being exposed to a nuclear blast.

The Iron Defender did not absorb the Milk; doing so would have been suicide. It simply served as a focus, driving it outward in a single collimated beam, directing it toward the fourth planet of the star system.

The beam crossed space at the speed of light, striking the planet. Spike did not see the effect, although Shining Armor was aware of it. At a distance, it did not look especially impressive. A single brilliant flash of light in the darkness of starry space. A flash caused by the heat of an entire planet’s quantity of Milk, resulting in the instantaneous atomization of the planet, then the splitting of the atoms into increasingly downscaled subatomic particles from the sheer energy of carrying that much power.

And yet the beam was still directed. As Mars was vaporized, one fragment remained, the only piece of Equestrian technology that could survive the blast. It was a continent-sized ring, forged to the schematics dredged from the deepest madness of the Xyuka Codex: the Soichet Ring. A vast, ring-shape array of magic and metal that drew on the power passing through it even as it heated far beyond its own theoretical maximum temperature. With this power, it sustained itself—and with it, it opened the gate, pouring the fuel back to Equestria.

On the surface of the silent and now-dead planet, the ash that had once been life drifted in the air. Plumes of carbon drifted in the quiet wind, and the rain came down black with what had once been people and their world.

One particular cloud of carbon began to drift, but then suddenly recoiled back upon itself with a thump, reforming itself instantaneously into Starlight Glimmer. The temporary death did not bother her and was not really her concern; it was not the first time she had been Milked, nor would it be the last. The draining of her entire vital force was barely an inconvenience; she had long-since transcended the need for life-force to continue her perpetual survival.

She looked up at the streets of the empty city, every shadow and surface lit with the brilliant light of Mars in flame, and she sighed as the lethal amount of radiation rebounded harmlessly off her body.

It was now out of her hands, metaphorically speaking. She was still a pony, unlike the rest of them, because she chose to be. She did not require the Alicorn because she had simply elected to supresede it--and the results of that choice, its consequence so to speak, had finally come to its terminus, the end of her path.

She had upheld her end of the bargain, and her job was done. The rest was now beyond her control.

A wooden door appeared beside her, a door that was peculiar in that it had only one Starlight on only one side. She opened it with her magic and stepped through, leaving one side with no Starlights at all. She was gone, forever leaving this Earth totally devoid of life with her departure.

Author's Note

In a sense, life itself must be considered as a question. Continuance is one possible answer, although if it is, the existence of the question itself is inherently negated.

Chapter 10: The Milkdrinker

And so, the sky above the Temple of Magic and the Alicorn Source tore open, a maelstrom of magic and fire as the rift across dimensions hemorrhaged and tainted ash fell to the land below, the storm pulling the blackened clouds of Equestria into its vortex and increasing the strength of the perpetual storms that raged across the surface of the dying world.

Those that were outside fled and hid in the shadows of what their world had once built—if they were ponies. Dragons watched from a distance, impassive to the sight of something that they had no need to comprehend. It was a contrivance of pony science and strange magic, and not something that concerned them. The poison it brought did not affect them, and they remained ambivalent.

The force of the consumed world fell down in a firestorm of magic. Inside the Sanctuary, the ancient magic-wrought technology fed the unpurified milk toward the central pentagram, focusing it into four of the five vertices of the Sacred Pentagram. The contents of the tanks screamed in pain as the entirety of the planet’s Milk was forced through their immortal bodies. Their mutated, hulking forms writhed in agony as the containment fluid in their tanks boiled, their cells shattering from the force of the Milk and reforming and differentiating, dying and being reborn as new cells of every type: masses of dissolving and reforming bone, teeth, eyes, horns, wood, venom and pain. They were the lenses, and this was their function.

The enormous pumps linked to them warmed up, forcing the copious quantities of black fluid through the feed architecture—and then, all at once, it all erupted outward into the system. The dark runes that linked the aspects of the pentagram lifted from the floor, assembling and increasing exponentially in complexity to form the magical equipment rendered in three-dimensions, then four, then five. The black fluid poured out of the tanks and, through the filtration tanks, emerged a brilliant, scalding white.

The ponies nearest to it shielded themselves, although they did not need to. Their faces had already been burned away, replaced with masks to protect themselves from the vast radiation emitted from the conduits as it flowed to its final destination. An entire planet’s worth of purified Milk was suddenly and simultaneously injected directly into the severed spine and brain of Twilight Sparkle.

In an instant, all of her severed parts disintegrated. The hooves, the wings, the canopic organs all blackened and collapsed to rot, then to gray dust, and finally to nothing at all. All that persisted was the spine and skull, and these were lowered into position.

Luster Dawn, the greatest of all mortal wizards, stepped forward, her organic body shielded by her own magic. She spread both of her hands into the field, casting the spells around them. Not spells that were required, but that would support the process. Accelerate it. Control it and ensure the efficiency of the process.

Her fingers caressed the forming pentagrams cast in her own floating silver blood, twisting as she summoned the truest of demonic icons, the language that Twilight had burned into her very soul. The second half of the spell, cast from the far side in pink-violet magic, met her spells and completed them. Spells forged in runes far beyond even Luster Dawn’s own knowledge, things of such depth that her own mortal mind ached just to view them.

The spine dropped and burst outward, rupturing as tendrils of violet flesh erupted from it. The spells responded, the differentiation controlled as the tendrils assembled themselves into complex organs, into bones and muscles and feathers. As a new Twilight Sparkle formed around her severed central nervous system.

She fell forward, falling limp, then stood, her body rejecting the ports fused into the bone of her back and separating her from the feed. It no longer needed to be connected, at least for the time being. She had absorbed all of it. The entirety of the Milk supply. She had fed to repletion and stood before her subjects, a beautiful unicorn—and as they beheld their one true god, her back ruptured, forming a pair of beautiful fluffy wings.

The spells collapsed. The process had burned away Luster Dawn’s hands, and all that remains were the smoldering, charred ends of her radius and ulna on both sides. She spread her arms to either side as the robotics descended, the blades slicing away her damaged arms at the shoulders and attaching a newly prepared set, aligning the vessels and nerves and automatically suturing the skin back in place.

Twilight, suddenly conscious, felt a different set of robotic arms descend around her. Without flinching, she felt as the brands pressed into her body, marking her with the demonic icons she needed to control the necrosis that was already beginning to spread throughout her body. The doctors, likewise, descended, carrying her royal armor, riveting it to her body and bolting it to her bones and flesh. One attached her crown, using an automatic driver to insert the long screws into her skull. Armor made from lustrous alien metal, itself inscribed with its own complimentary set of runes. The armor she needed to control the decay, to extend how long this new body would last.

There had been a point long ago when she had scarcely been able to withstand the pain. When it had first happened, she had even tried to fight them. They had held her down and completed their work. Now, though, she barely noticed. She sensed the pain, smelled the burned flesh, and could feel the insertion of every screw and rivet—but it hardly mattered. The rush of the Milk overcame it. The intrinsic, terrible joy of being pulled from the very precipice of the void back to fully formed, divine life. She had grown to enjoy the pain and to enjoy the Milk being inserted into her body. This fact was her greatest source of shame. That she enjoyed what she had become.

Spike arrived as the process was completing. He entered through the gate as Twilight stepped out from among the doctors, her body beautiful and regenerated—but already showing sings of decomposition, however mild. She was disconnected from the machines. The only time she could be disconnected, when they needed to cool and the lens-filters regenerated. The only time she was separate from the Alicorn.

She looked up at him and smiled. It was the most sincere smile Spike had ever known, but he could not look away from her eyes. They were the way they always looked shortly after regeneration: red, with no apparent pupil or sclera. Pure red, glossy spheres.

Spike had not previously known why, exactly, they changed. He had always assumed it was some part of the process, some side-effect of the Milk—but now he knew. Now he understood. He knew whose eyes those were. In the air, he could smell it. A smell he had detected countless thousands of times before, but only now comprehended where it came from. A distant, spicy-sweet smell of dying carnations.

“Spike,” she said, looking up at him with joy on her face. “You did it.”

Spike stared back at her. He smiled, but felt it fade quickly.

“You’re already dying.”

Twilight looked down at the necrosis that was staring to consume her body. A thin line of luminescent fluid dripped from the corner of her mouth.

“I know,” she said.

“The last one lasted almost a year.”

“Seven months. The last one lasted seven months. But this one...it must not have had as much Milk as the others.”

Spike shook his head. “You’re starting to resist it.”

A frown began to cross over Twilight’s face. A frown that hid her growing fear—but she forced herself to be cheerful again.

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not. But it doesn’t matter. I’m strong enough to open new doors again. New paths to new planets to get more Milk.”

“More Proto-Vandrare.”

Twilight averted her eyes. Despite the fact that they had no apparent pupil, Spike could always tell the way she was looking. There was some unnatural, alien mechanism within the eyes to direct their attention, something barely perceptible. They were not Twilight’s eyes—but they were the ones that had formed in her skull. The mare attached to them, regardless of what she had become, was still Twilight.

“Twilight?”

“I think...I think it might be time...”

“For what?”

She smiled sheepishly. “Parallel Earths are not the only source of Milk. There might be...other doors I can open.”

“We’ve tried aliens. They don’t yield--”

“Not aliens.”

Spike paused, considering what she meant, confused. Then, as he realized it, his eyes widened.

“You...you want to drain other Equestrias.”

“Not just any Equestrias! Not all of them are good, right? Some are evil. Bad places. Places where bad ponies are in charge. Evil ponies. Chrysalis, Tirac, Cozy Glow, Daybreaker--they must have won somewhere. Those are bad Equestrias. No one will miss them. We can...we can use their power for good, right? Make our world better? There’s an infinite number of parallel universes, an infinite source of Milk if I keep opening the doors--”

“They’re still ponies. And the Proto-Vandrare are still people. People that died. For...this.”

Twilight was breathing harder. Tears began to escape her eyes. Tears that glowed bright white. “Do you think I don’t know that, Spike? This, the things I’ve done it’s...it’s all wrong. I know that. I’ve always known that. But I don’t have a choice. This is the only way. The only way to keep them alive, the only way to save my friends. I—I can’t stop, I can’t leave them, I have to help them, Spike—”

She was hyperventilating, and Spike knelt down. He reached out with his hand, only to see her recoil at the sight of the burns on it.

“Spike! What did—what did you do? You’re hurt!”

“I did what I had to. To save a friend.”

Her eyes met his. “Spike I’m...I’m sorry. The things I’ve made you do...the terrible things I’ve made you see. You must hate me. I’ve been a terrible friend. I wish...I just wish I didn’t have to ask...”

“Hey,” said Spike, putting his uninjured claw on her shoulder. “It’s okay. And it’s going to be okay. I’m your number one assistant, remember?”

Twilight wiped her tears away and smiled. “Spike...”

“You’ll always be my friend. I love you. Don’t worry. Together, we’ll fix this. We’ll make everything right. Right? Everything's going to be okay.”

Twilight smiled and nodded. “That’s right, Spike. We can do this. If we’re together, we can do anything.”

He smiled and spread his arms for a hug. Twilight laughed and hugged him back. His arms closed around her. Spike held her, running his rune-inscribed hand on the back of her head, gently stroking her mane. It was so silky and beautiful, although parts were already starting to fall out. He could feel the runes carved into her scalp responding to his own.

“I love you too, Spike. Thank you. For always being there for me.”

Spike stopped moving his hand, and as his grip increased, there was a momentary resistance—and then a sensation of sudden motion as her skull gave way, fragmenting in his grasp. His claws moving through something soft and warm and a burst of liquid onto his hand.

Her eyes widened in confusion, and she tried to speak, but there was nothing she could do. She was disconected form the system. The only time she would be vulnerable. The only time she would let her guard down.

Her body shuddered as she took her last breaths—and then she expired.

The doctors turned to face him, confused, as their Alicorn cystals simultaneously fractured and fell dark. They all fell, their brains surviving for barely a few seconds without their artificial lungs feeding them oxygen. One by one, each fell, quietly crumpling to the floor.

It was not just them. In that moment, without Twilight to guide it, the Alicorn failed--and all of Equestria died.

Far away, across countless universes, Shining Armor took a sudden breath, then, unable to take another, drowned in his tank, having never seen his wife or daughter again. Far below on his ship, Lightning Dust, alone in the flying bank, ceased to function, dreaming of once again flying as her brain fired its last electrical spasms.

Elsewhere, Derpy, in a tank full of formadehyde and coated in glowing demonic runes, ceased her parody of life, her daughters falling forward and collapsing against her box as the runes flickered out of existence.

In the Temple of Generosity, an army of Sweetie Belles looked at each other, then ceased operation. They sat down and did not move, no longer having the volition to be anything other than machines--and each shut down sequentially, carefully deactivating themselves one after the other until there were none left. The last one to go stared at the controls, seeing the flat-line of the brainwaves of what they had once been tasked to maintain. She smiled as she turned herself off for the last time.

Under the Temple of Generosity, the parody of Applebloom that they had been attempting to create finally succeeded in dying--but under the Temple of Loyalty, as Scootaloo died, something overtook her, a machine still all-too-alive devouring what was left of her and immediately reforming itself into a more amenable format. That day, something that looked like an orange-and-purple dragon left the Temple, never to return.

This continued. Everywhere, and all at once. Every pony, now abstracted form the Alicorn, died.

The only one who survived a few moments longer was Luster Dawn. Her body was made of flesh, not machinery. She collapsed forward, the Alicorn that had held the diverse tissues of her body failing and causing them to separate. Muscle and bone and nerve came apart as she dissolved, her head still managing to take several labored breaths as her eyes filled with tears. She tried to speak, groaning and barely managing to form words, but she too expired, her own eyes going dark.

Spike was alone. Totally alone. And, for the first time in as long as he could remember, he began to cry.

Outside, Dragonlord Ember landed on the crumbling steps of the Temple of Magic. She crossed over the fractured and abraded stone toward where a heavy door had fallen in, save for the linkage of one rusted hinge. When she pushed on it, it fell in with a resounding sound in the silence.

She entered. On either side, she saw the guards that had once stood sentry of the Temple. They lay on the ground, their bulky armor rusted to the point where it barely showed the symbols that had once been inscribed on their surface. In some cases, their helmets had remained, preserving what were now mummified heads; in other cases, they had shattered on the concrete floor and the exposure to air had left nothing but bone. Skulls staring back at her with empty eye sockets.

The stone had faded, dust piling in the corners. Looking up, she saw the bright yellow light of the sun pouring through spaces where only the edges of shattered stained-glass windows stood.

She marveled at how fast the decay had progressed. How when the ponies had stopped the whole world had faded in a single instant, the last of their dying culture evaporating in a single blink. That this much damage could occur in a time as inconsequential as twelve centuries was barely conceivable. In the time of a warm afternoon nap, their civilization had vanished entirely into memory and half-preserved relics.

She felt her scales warmed by the sun above. No longer red and dying as it once had been. The world had moved on. The Age of Dragons had progressed. A dragon mage had been born with the godlike power to raise the sun, and his little sister from the same clutch born with the power to control the path of the moon.

Dragon civilization had expanded, crossing the globe. Not just tribes living in caves, or even towns, but whole vast, technological cities. Magic had been restored to them, and new culture formed, guided by her own claw. Which was funny. That with the ponies gone, her world had risen almost instantly.

She stopped at the massive statue of the ancient, deformed thing that bore five heads. It had partially collapsed in places, its form corroding from the acid atmosphere of the world. At her feet, small reptiles skittered in every direction. Many of them were rockodilians, but not all. Ancient life, buried in the hottest fissures and at the edges of the eldest volcanoes, had begun to spread across the world. While it would never be green again, life was abundant. Beings made of fire and trees that grew not out of wood but from rock, bearing crystalline fruits. Even now, in this abandoned place, Ember saw the light of thousands of lava larvae hanging from the surfaces of the ancient statue, and in the blazing sunlight she saw the equally brilliant wings of the flocks of tends of thousands of phoenixes passing in the distance.

To cylinders stood before it. Neither were operational, their surfaces pitted and stained, their contents long-since desiccated. Ember placed a claw on each of them, using her own magic to activate a door. Then she stepped through.

It was dark, but her eyes adjusted, and even for a dragon she was forced to behold the sight before her. The sight of lava larvae that had completed their pupation, of hundreds of magma-moths providing the light for a forest of life, or rocky trees and lichens that bloomed in brilliant shades of brown and gray.

She approached the center. She saw several corroded, rusted robotic bodies, their heads consisting of skulls with oxidized masks—and one skull that was preserved perfectly, linked to a rusted collar with an empty crystal and beside a plume of bones showing signs of having been perfectly cut into a pile that no longer had any semblance of organic anatomy.

Looking beyond, she saw several large tanks looming in the darkness. Tanks that contained indescribable masses of bone and wood, collapsed and dead, the empty eye-sockets of their rotted forms staring outward blankly and almost in relief. Things behind broken, grimy glass that had been dead for so very long.

She stopped. She stared at the dragon before her, kneeling on the ground amongst the fire-moss and tiny reptiles of the new world, his armor aged and corroded and his body covered in the same lichen that grew on the surfaces of this ancient place.

In his claws, he held a skeleton. The wings had fallen away, but the rest was still mostly intact, his claw buried in the shattered skull. He held this skeleton, and he wept quietly over her, his tears staining trails down the white of her bones.

Ember spoke. “Spike,” she said. “You did the right thing.”

He sniffled slightly, and looked over his shoulder at her. Then, gingerly and lovingly, he set the skeleton down into the brilliant glow of the moss that had grown around him. He gently stroked her head, and then stood, wiping his tears.

“I know,” he said. “I know.”