I've Got Only My Bones

I already know that the three soldiers he was complaining about were the ones I killed. It shouldn’t be hard to guess why I didn’t mention that. Honestly, if I had, and he had been inexplicably calm about it, it wouldn’t have changed much. The Hellknights had done just about everything short of it by that point.

On the inside, changelings and ponies are not the same. I'm not being metaphorical, their organs are entirely different colors and shapes. I don’t know that because I was tearing them open, either, the changelings are immune to nearly all of my dark magic and so starting a fight with them was a very very very bad idea. Technically they don’t even have souls, although this seems to produce no difference in behavior between them and their red-blooded counterparts. It was the Hellknights who loved to let everyone see their newest victories who showed me these factoids. Finding the remains of their friends in the town square, tortured to death and hacked to pieces, did not endear us to the changelings, and their violent reprisals didn’t endear them to us. As the small victories racked up, the Hellknights became ever bolder and the changelings became ever angrier. Eventually either the bugs would be pushed back by the army for the losses sustained or the town would be destroyed, both of which were good for the war effort, if not necessarily for us. That’s the kind of strategy which makes a normal pony sick just to imagine it, and yet comes easily to a committed dark magician.

My key into the Hellknights was a part-time scoundrel and part-time grocery store checkout clerk. Years of shoddy construction had left the less economically-privileged quarter of town also less bomb-proof, and the impoverished were packed into the remaining buildings like soldiers in a mass grave. I had been glad to be homeless so that I didn’t have to deal with it, and then even more glad to afford a hotel room. Once I had found the stallion in question, I thought of the best way to approach the topic.

“Excuse me, I believe you have something I’ve been looking for.” I said to the gruff, weathered pegasus in the mildewed hall as he made his way home from work the day after my meeting with Mr. Hay.

“I don’t have your money, but if you want drugs, you can pay like everyone else, and then I will have your money.” He grunted, pushing past me. But I’ve talked to these kinds before. It’s like talking to the rich and the middle-class, except being more educated in your tone makes you less respected instead of more. Many of the Equestrian poor are proud of their poverty, but it’s a harmless sort of pride. They aren’t skipping school or anything. They say the hard work makes them tougher. The opposite is true, the lack of hard work makes them bearable. Equestria’s social safety net is big enough that no one has to live on the streets if they don’t want to, and thus, no one has to get into any truly bad habits. It’s just that what it would take to be on the receiving end of those social programs is a price I’m not willing to pay.

On the streets, the real streets, there are two kinds of ponies. Felons on the run, and those too mentally-ill to function in a bureaucracy. That’s what it takes to be truly impoverished. Neither one is nice. I have been in a lot of self-defense situations. Really, I myself am a rare breed by being halfway in between the two groups. You occasionally see ponies in between two different states of home-ness, but they’re transient.

A few weeks as a hobo makes many sympathetic to the cause, however. Finding a house to stay at was rarely difficult when I needed it, the problem was that after the first few hours the residents would realize, no matter what you did, that they couldn’t help you and the government can. Except I’m not a normal pony, so that’s not true for me. Once they started talking about that, I had only a little time left before they expected me to leave, and if I didn’t leave with a smile on their face, I would leave with a grimace on their face instead. There was little difference.

Ironically, in Equestria, the social programs are so advanced that the margins of society are small to the point of being unlivable. If you’re too destitute for even free housing, you’re living trashcan-to-trashcan until you get stabbed by a drug addict who should be on pills for schizophrenia but is actually on pills for bipolar disorder. Sorry.

But for now, all of that is irrelevant to me. I’m in a rare position where I have money. Also the social programs all got defunded to pay for tanks.

What is relevant is knowing that no matter how small the numbers get or how criminal the entrepreneurs are, every pony is interested in their business. “Actually it’s membership to a certain exclusive club. Word on the street is you can get the right kind of pony in, and they like that about you.”

He stops, concerned. “Maybe I can. What kind of club is it, and who’s asking?”

“They call it ‘V’ for ‘Very Angry Patriots’. It seems like my kind of group, as someone who is a very angry patriot.” I said, trying to be cool and possibly not succeeding.

“’Very Angry Patriots’, huh?” He rubbed his chin performatively. “Yeah, I know who you’re talking about. But what the hay makes you think they want you?”

“I love their work. Like that ‘performance’ in the town square, or the ‘show’ down main avenue. I love it so much I want to contribute.” I referred to the various places where the bodies of occupation soldiers had been found, with an eye towards the ones where they were in as many pieces as possible.

The pegasus looked me up and down. “And why not join the Royal Army if you hate the bugs so much?”

“They wouldn’t let me do the things I want to do.” I flatly explain before I realize how screwed-up I sound. It’s technically true, but it gets the wrong idea across. Well, for this group, it might be the right idea, but still.

“Alright.” The pegasus admits defeat with a look of concern on his face. “You seem like their kind of mare. Nothing to gain. Nothing to lose. I’ll let them know about you. What’s your name?”

“Pernicious Poison. When should I hear back from them?” I ask.

“Don’t worry about it. They’ll come to you.”

I told my not-so-secret-agent friend about the meeting. He moved to another room in the same hotel, so it was not hard to find time to talk in private. Mr. Hay said to trust they would come. They had for the previous agents.

It certainly took them a while. I went out to the Wee Baguette to celebrate my new job. “How much are you making?” The waiter asked.

“Fifty bits per day.” I beamed.

“That’s less than minimum wage,” He said.

“But it’s more than I made before.” I pointed out. I even got dessert intentionally this time.

The day after the meeting, I went about my normal routine. I got very little research done for reasons unrelated to my new job. When I came back, I asked the doorman if there were any messages for me. He said no.

The only noteworthy thing was what happened when I went to the grocery store. I was tired of having two cheese sandwiches for breakfast every day, and wanted to get some other food. When I arrived, there was a commotion in progress. A changeling soldier had abandoned his uniform and tried to blend in with the civilian population, but after days of not eating meat, he passed out from hunger in the middle of the store and dropped his disguise. I got to help another pony keep an angry mob at bay until the military police arrived to drag the poor thing to some prisoner camp somewhere. I was nearly struck multiple times, but the civilian helpers blocked off the group with our bodies, keeping them from being able to clearly see the object of their hatred, forcing them to watch as it left them and they couldn’t do anything without trampling their fellow ponies. There was so much fury in that crowd that the few of us who were keeping everyone back probably made the difference between law and lynching. Even if it hates me, the law has helped me more than wanton murder ever has.

Then I went back to my room and had a tasty PB+J sandwich.

The day after that, I stopped by the store to get some crackers so that I could branch out even more and not just eat sandwiches all the time. Then I went to do research.

As I was investigating the newest freshly-dug grave deep in the woods, I heard a voice behind me. “What are you doing?” It asked. I turned, and it was an Equestrian soldier, but not a living one, it was one of the ones I had just raised from the dead.

“I am finding out who was buried here.” I lied to the revenant.

“You need to give me a proper burial.” He demanded. “It’s the least you all can do for me after dragging from my home and sending me to be slaughtered by the machine guns.”

“I can send for a priest once I’m done.” I offered.

“You can send for a priest right now.” He forcefully stated. “Actually, what the buck are you doing?”

I looked at his body, which was standing upright and offering his wallet to me. “Nothing.” I said.

The revenant put his hoof to his mouth and whistled. The other five bodies in the grave had their own revenants appear besides the first one, all angry. The forest roared with a mighty tearing noise as they pulled a tree from the ground to throw it at me. It splintered as it landed hard against the ground. I was already running. I got on my bike and pedaled away as fast as possible. I was not equipped to deal with revenants.

I pulled the shards of wood out of me as I explained to a priest what happened. Leaving out some details, of course.

This exercise really hit home what had had me concerned for the past month or so. When I first made my way to the front lines, my research advanced in leaps and bounds. It was slowing down again. This was a problem, since I was hardly closer to my specific end goal of being able to pull a soul back into its body. I’d been at this for well over a decade. If I didn’t get tutelage, it was looking increasingly possible that I could die of old age before achieving what I wanted. I had thought about becoming a lich so that I could be unbounded by time, but preliminary research showed that it required a lot of the same knowledge as the initial objective anyways. Plus, when you’re a lich, you open yourself up to other ponies messing with your phylactery. It’s important that you get that right and you only get one shot. That’s why you have smartasses like Sombra, who hid his in the interstice because then only another dark magician could reach it, and then every time he got defeated his body was reformed in the interstice and was stuck there until someone pulled him out or he had managed to scrape together enough power to force his way out. I wouldn’t make that mistake, but that is far from the only way it can go wrong.

So, if lichdom isn’t the way to the end, what is? I really need the Hellknights to come through on this one. It’s terrifying to wonder if you’ll never have anything to look forwards to ever again.

When I returned to the hotel, there was someone a distance away from the front door, staring at it worriedly. “What’s wrong, sir?” I asked.

I must have startled him. He took a second to breathe and his nerve back before he said, “I’m waiting for someone.”

“Oh. Well, I probably can’t help you, but good luck.” I replied.

Then something happened, and I’m currently in the trunk of a moving car with a headache and a bag over my head, so I guess this is the Hellknights getting into contact with me.

Taking stock of my situation, it’s not as bad as it first seems. I still have Deadmouse on me. It’s a new one I picked up yesterday since the old one was getting pretty musty, but that won’t matter. I try to look into the realm of the spirits to see how many are in the car, and discover that I have a magic suppressor ring on my horn. I’ve got a small spool of magical thread for just such a situation, since this isn’t the first time I’ve been restrained in the back of a moving vehicle, only the first time it hasn’t been legal. The mouse grabs the thread from my pocket and wraps it around my horn through the grooves, bypassing the suppressor. It could hold a normal unicorn, but since Deadmouse already my thrall, controlling it is a matter of the spirit rather than magical expression and the ring can be circumvented.

Before I start sensing death again, I consider that my kidnappers were laying in ambush for me. They know both of my eyes work because they saw me with both working. I can’t give up one to do it, I have to use something else. If they’ve bound me this tight and dragged me out this far, they probably don’t think it’s off the table that they’ll get rough with me, so I give up most of my sense of pain for a while instead.

I normally don’t like doing that. It might seem wonderful to be able to turn off pain, and it is at first, but one time I was running from the law and broke my leg while my pain was nullified. I only realized I had broken it after I had already escaped. The running had made the damage far, far worse, and if I had used it much more it might have fallen off entirely. I couldn’t walk for six months until I found the power to heal it. During that time, I began to wonder if I had done something similar by turning off my rage, my sadness, my despair, and all the other uncomfortable emotions, and I let those return, too. Then I looked back at what I had been doing while unable to feel negatively and realized I was becoming a monster that no one worth knowing could ever love. There was a reason why I was able to sell them for power, rather than being forced to buy their absence. I was only lucky that caution made me sell them temporarily, rather than permanently.

Remember what I said about dark magic having layers of ways to make you a bad creature?

Pain dulled and senses expanded, I look around. There are four others in the car. Hardly any death is around us, except for one or two large clusters. After a few minutes, I can see a long line of dead bodies far below us. So we’re over the river.

It was for nothing. As soon as we’re at our destination, they pull me out of the car and tear the bag from my head. I barely have time to put the thread away before I see the open sky again. We’re at a lumber mill, a very old one, miles into the woods. None of my captors are hiding their face. That’s a big problem. It means they don’t expect me to tell anyone who they are, probably because I’m dead. But this is supposed to be an evil cult, I should have expected to either pass their test or die.

They pull me into the basement of the lumber mill and tie me to a chair. The leader is a red unicorn. He almost seems younger than me, and sits across from me like this is the thirteenth time he’s had this conversation. “Care to explain yourself?” He demands.

“I want to join the Hellknights. It’s not complicated.” I say.

“It’s not that.” He calmly explains. “It’s that the last two agents SMILE sent were told that we didn’t want them. Now here’s a third. I think the message isn’t getting across like it should be. Who’s your handler? We want to talk with him.” Behind the unicorn, an earth pony flips a switch on a battery.

The unicorn tears my shirt open and takes two sets of clips which are wired to the large battery before touching them to my body. I can tell that it hurts quite a lot, but the pain is mostly dulled and I can grit my teeth and bear it. “I don’t have a handler. I’m here because I want to be.” I force out through the spasms and twitches.

So this is the test. I don’t know of any spell that lets a unicorn turn off their own pain, but a necromancer will pretty quickly stumble across it. Either you must have some skill already, or really, REALLY want to join. Traditionally, the latter group is given a taste of power to make them work hard, and then ground into test material. And there’s at least one body in the yard out back.

The unicorn across from me replies, “I don’t believe you,” and puts the electrodes against my body again. My comparative lack of reaction seems confuses him.

“That’s your problem, not mine.” I say. He puts the electrodes away and picks up a hammer from a toolkit. “Try not to break anything, it will be hard for me to work with you if I’m stuck in a hospital.”

The unicorn grimaces and brings the hammer down on one of my legs. It hurts, but I barely show it. “You’re taking this awfully well.” He comments.

“Just showing my dedication to the cause. Pain isn’t for me. It’s for them. I’m sure you understand.” I spent a long time thinking of that line and I wanted to use it. I knew the audience would like it. Really, I don’t have any particular grievance with the changelings as a race. Even though they’re ruining my beautiful country, their evils are hardly worse than what ponies do when they’ve been raised poorly. Hell, I’ve said that my parents didn’t go far enough when they kicked me to the curb, but I feel that way for reasons of practicality. Ethically, it was a morally reprehensible and terminally hypocritical act, and the only reason I don’t hate them for it is because anyone else would have done about the same. Why hate a creature for being normal?

The unicorn decides to bring out the big guns. His hammer goes back in its case and a can of gasoline in the corner glows bright red and lifts itself to him. He pulls a rag from the cap and kicks my chair over, my head impacting against the solid ground hard enough to daze me. Right before the wet towel goes over my face, I realize that physical pain is the only thing I shut off, and fear remains.

It’s not the scalding acid that sends me into a fit. It’s the sensation of drowning. Even without feeling the pain, my body knows that I’m breathing liquid instead of air. Adrenaline flows and the specter of death feels like it has finally come for me. Every ounce of willpower I have is going towards simply remembering that this can’t actually kill me, even if every fiber of my being is telling me that I need to do whatever it takes to stop filling my lungs with fluids before I suffocate in my own body. I thrash about, straining my muscles to their fullest, but my bonds are built for a much stronger pony than I. After what felt like a small eternity, the rag comes off. “Still feeling the dedication?” The unicorn asks.

They must have been expecting me to also have turned off things like fear. I can’t let them think I’m sub-par by revealing I kept that impulse. “Did I stutter?” I force myself to say.

The rag goes on again and the terror returns. A thought occurs to me that, if I can’t speak quickly enough, they may notice I’ve only got some of the abilities they think a new acolyte needs to make the cut. Then it won’t matter how much I’ve kept myself together. I will become another reject, another corpse in a shallow hole in the yard. My concentration fails me and go into a blind panic. There is no more plan, no more thinking, just me repeating to myself, over and over again, that I have to get out of here!

The next time the rag comes off, I don’t have the presence of mind to say anything. I’m a blubbering mess shouting incoherencies. “This is more what I was expecting out of you.” The unicorn says. I have just enough time to realize I must assert myself, then the rag goes back on and my mind is once again sent into abject terror.

At some point, a thought occurred to me. How can I spend this much time around corpses and be this terrified of death? It was a thought that stopped seeming poignant as soon as I grasped it, and it was quickly washed away in a new dose of gasoline and mortal fright regardless.

Coughing and sputtering, I’m brought vertical again. The smell of gasoline has seeped into my mind, and I’m still screaming even if by now my throat is hoarse. The unicorn says something, but I don’t hear it. He gets in my face and says it louder. Then he yells it louder once again. I can tell there are words, but not what they are. I hope I correctly guess what he’s talking about even though I barely recognize that he’s talking at all. “Yes, I still want to join!” I fail to shout. I take a moment to try and steady myself. “Yes, I still want to join!” I once again exclaim, this time calmly enough for it to be made out. My heartbeat is slowing to a non-fatal level now that I’m not in danger anymore, and the ability to act consciously is slowly returning.

“You’ve got guts, little lady.” The unicorn said. “But that’s not how you join the ranks of the elite.”

“WHAT ARE YOU, THE CELESTIA-DAMNED RAINBOW FACTORY?!” I yelled. It took a lot of self-control to not curse him out for the suffering he had caused me personally, and to keep my anger relevant to his interests. “YOU NEARLY GAVE ME A HEART ATTACK! THEN WHAT WOULD YOU DO? GO OUT AND WASTE EVEN MORE OF YOUR OWN TIME BURYING ME?”

There was a pause.

“I’m sorry, but… what the hell? I got the point when you brought out the hammer!” I continued, panting.

The unicorn smirked. “The suffering builds character.”

“No! Your target audience is ponies who won’t care! That’s all you need to know!”

“It’s torture. It doesn’t end when you stop being comfortable with it.”

I looked him in the eyes. “Are you here to make ponies suffer, or are you here to accomplish something? If this is just a pain engine, I don’t need to be here and neither do you!”

The unicorn thinks about it. “Well, its possible that I wanted a bit more assurance than I needed. But it pays to be cautious. Are you willing to overlook that?”

Hardly in a mood to be polite and reeking of fuel, I barked, “I already said I still want to become a Hellknight.”

The unicorn nodded. The ropes around my body and limbs fell away. “Welcome to the Order, knight. Call me Prince.” I wasn’t in the mood to get out of the chair and see what state I was in. When he held out his hoof for me, I let him come to me to shake on it, but instead he pulled me up, sending bolts of pain that I can feel even though the self-inflicted numbness. “I’m surprised you can stand after that.” He chuckled.

“So am I. Just call me ‘Poison’, if that’s okay.”

“Fine by me, Poison. Just understand one thing. None of this happened. You weren’t here, you fell down the stairs or something, and you aren’t one of us. I don’t care how much pressure you’re under. I’ll show you our methods a bit later. For now, go home and think about how much better Equestria will be once we’ve had our way with it.” He smiled softly. “And for the record, the gasoline-boarding has caught VOPS operatives before. They handle it like a champ. No one else does.”

“Is that so?” I ask, trying to show interest to get my sense of place back.

“Oh, yes. Now, if you’re going to be with us, I think I should mention what exactly our goal is.” I take the cue, or the excuse, to sit back down. My aching body relishes the stillness. The unicorn begins to pace the room, his companions taking up positions around him. “The Hellknights were formed over a century ago as a rather different organization. Our founding fathers believed that Celestia was hiding something from us, a spark of true divinity that we were not ready for. They knew their beliefs were heretical and outright illegal by many definitions, but they pushed forwards, grasping for the secrets of the sun. They believe that she has only ever shown a fraction of her true power, and that, by being her strongest warriors, we can convince her to release herself upon our enemies. Convince her that we are ready to look upon her holy light in its full glory.”

“I can see it.” I encouraged.

Prince put his hooves on the rests of the chair. “You might see it, but you don’t understand it. When we fight the invader, we are not just fighting the changelings. We are fighting to create a new Equestria, one ruled by the true goddess of ponykind. One where no one will ever dare to touch us, one where we will be the clear masters of all we survey, one where we will rule the continent if not the world for ever and a day! The cowards of Equestria who fear the sun’s true might are just as much the enemy as the invader, the heathen, and the communist! We may have removed the bugs from this land, but the enemy is still all around us! Do you understand what we must do? What will be asked of you?”

This was dramatic, but it was not terribly surprising. You couldn’t say out loud that you were a dark cabal, you had to wrap it up in some mythos where you were just as Equestrian as everyone else but held some unpopular belief that made you separate. It was only the inner circle who would know the truth: That the future did not hold any vestige of the current order. The myth of the group being ancient was also common to add mystery, although this particular band might actually be decades old if the rumors were anything to go by. “I accept my duties,” I respond with grim determination, knowing full well that they’re mostly going to be taking advantage of me.

Yet, in between the lines of what he has said, I notice things that the common pony can’t even dream of. The heretical beliefs he mentioned sound quite similar to something I have seen with my own two eyes. To hear these ponies build a plan to grow it, I see the future. Visions of monuments and tempests, of a new harmony that even has room for ponies like me, yet in a nation that is stronger than any that has ever existed, and probably any that ever will. Even if I become more fuel for the fire, their goal, at least the one they tell me, is worthy enough that I would perish for it.

“...And then they gave me the initiation pledge and a time and address.” I explain to my handler.

His hooves were covering his face in grave shame. “I’m so sorry.” He mumbles. My version left out plenty of things that a normal pony wouldn’t have found out about. As far as he knows, I experienced every ounce of pain they inflicted on me while scared and confused.

“Don’t be. It wasn’t that bad.” I say.

“Last two agents had the same routine. They figured they were burned. You were right, the fact that the bad guys weren’t wearing masks anymore probably meant they intended to kill you.” His pulled a hoof through his short mane. “Celestia, I nearly killed you.”

I sit besides him to try and calm him down. “Hey. I knew the job was dangerous when I took it. Just keep the checks coming.”

“Yeah, I guess I can’t waste this opportunity. Miss, I’m really sorry.”

“No, seriously, it’s fine. I survived. And really I probably would have done it without you goading me if only I knew how.”

He sits there, worried sick. “What has Equestria come to? I’m not supposed to be sending random ponies to torture chambers.”

If I were a him I would be more concerned about the fact that a major city was beset by, at best, a band of radical religious fanatics, and at worst a mature dark conspiracy planning to take over the country. But I suppose that’s what makes me the evil one.