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.