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.