The teleportation spell corrupted, rerouted through Synchronia’s neural circuits. The pair emerged high above a mountain, emerging violently from their loop around a single segment of void. Synchronia began to fall, only for Misty to emerge behind her, righting herself in the air—and igniting it with a pair of enchanted plasma beams. Toxic mystical fire spewed forth, collumnating into a pair of beams that she then twisted, pouring a powerful electromagnetic field through them. Synchronia suddenly found herself accelerating to supersonic speeds, forming a technomagic sphere to defend herself as she was slammed into the side of a cliff.

Misty teleported to the ground, taking an attack stance as she pulled the fire back around her. It did not feel like how she had expected it would. It felt so good. There was an overwhelming joy in the unlimited hatred flowing through her, the uncontrolled loathing for all ponies. She could barely control it. Drawing on the fire made it spread, burning through her mind. Burning her out. Replacing Misty with Opaline Arcana.

The fire cracked and sputtered as Misty suddenly felt her hatred suddenly falter. She fell to her knees, tears welling in her eyes at the horror of it. She was unsure if her own mind had pulled her back from the brink or if Opaline was simply running low on power. She was still weak—and Misty understood with a creeping certainty exactly what would happen if her so-called mentor were allowed to be strong.

A figure stepped through the smokeless fire. Unburned and smiling, Synchronia stepped forward.

“Necrophire will not harm me,” she said, in an almost sing-song cadence. “However. I would appreciate if you did not harm my new skin. It is so soft and delicate. Soon I will be oh-so adorable.” Her horn ignited with light, and the blue fire froze in a strange orange prismatic fashion—only to retract into itself, pulsing and writhing as it became matter, then flesh, then machinery. As it was compressed into a system of cubes that then aligned into their own silent, floating parade of geometric flesh-machines that drifted away to the upper atmosphere.

“Is that why you took it?” snapped Misty, standing, her body once again igniting with cursed fire. Feeling the hatred simmer and rise, gaining pressure within her.

“Do you know,” asked Synchronia, stopping over Misty. “What happened to my real skin? My real muscles and flesh? My organs, my eyes, my brain?”

“Why would I care?”

“Twilight Sparkle. She peeled me, Misty. Sequentially stripped me of all living flesh until I was nothing more than my machine skeleton and a living, infected tantabus. Do you know why, Misty? Why Twilight Sparkle stole all my flesh?”

“Again. Why. Would. I. Care.”

Synchronia smiled. “Because She loved me, Misty. I simply recognized that I was not worthy of Her love. But now She is counting on me. She needs me. And when I do what She wants...She will love me again. And I will finally, finally be happy. After so many thousands of millennia.”

“And what, exactly, does she want?”

“The survival of Equestria. The survival of ponies. Which requires the utter eradication of all life on this planet. Such is the purest desire of the Destroyer-Goddess, the One True Alicorn, Twilight Sparkle. She who Slew All Ponies, for they were unworthy of her love.”

Misty cast a jet of necrophire, pointing it directly at the skin on Synchronia’s ugly face. Skin that made her look like a sickly parody of Sunny Starscout. A pony that Misty found she hated more and more every second—a pony threatening to steal the only thing that truly mattered. Unlimited POWER.

Synchronia cast a shield spell that fractured on impact—only to be supported by a system of pale technomagic that surrounded it, assisted by several of cubes that surrounded her. It held for a moment, then fractured, and the fire burned through her body, melting metal and plastic before she could fully get out of the way.

The machine lurched to one side, melting and on fire, but still fully active. The smile had faded somewhat from her face.

“You can’t win,” said Misty, charging the next blow. Feeling that she was getting close. The skull was indestructible, but the body that it was attached to was a Canterlogic product. A very destructible item.

“Because you are drawing power from the planet’s failing convergence? I have magic as well. For the first time...well, ever.”

“No. Not really.”

Synchronia seemed confused.

“You may have grown a horn, but it’s Sunny’s. And you can’t...” Her hatred faded again, her power weakening. “You can’t use it. Because it’s not yours, and it’s not hers. It’s theirs. It’s made from the Power of Friendship. Something you’ll never have.”

Synchronia smiled. “Misty. I have spent more lifetimes than my own studying magic. I am not worthy of friends. But neither are you. There are more ways than one to power. And if power is the only reason you’re seeking friendship, you’ve kind of missed the point.”

The ground around Misty shook as she shot forward, her body dissociating into individual particles ignited with Opaline’s fire—only to strike hard against a barrier she could not initially penetrate. She increased pressure, only to feel something strange. An anomaly creeping into the corners of her mind. Something that she thought might always have been there. A cold, steely joy filled with the distant, pleasing scent of carnations.

She looked up through the tripartate barrier: a bezel of false machine-magic constraining Synchronia’s copy of Sunny’s magic—but in the center, something far darker and less describable. The other aspects merely existing as a means to sustain a power from elsewhere. And, though it, Misty could see that Synchronia’s eyes had changed. They had lost all definition, becoming pure red as yellow flesh crept from their rims. Changing the little skin she had as the infection tried so hard to spread.

Something within Opaline’s arcane knowledge reacted with extreme revulsion, even fear—but it was lost in the far deeper tempest of fear being poured into Misty. Opaline’s own fear. The fear that had over time evolved to loneliness, then to hatred, and then to a sickening parody of burning, empty joy.

The spell slithered, expanding, and Misty compensated, falling backward as her flames crept into the ground around her. Syncrhonia stepped forward, her magic slipping and falling over her body into armor to defend her weak mechanical frame. That, Misty understood, was her weakness. Synchronia was devoting a substantial amount of magic to protecting her body, ensuring her head was not severed. Because if it was, she would go back to what she had been. Just an inert skull.

Then it appeared, all at once. Something reaching out toward her from nowhere and everywhere, tentacles of strange flesh emerging from places halfway seated between geometry of Synchronia’s own creation. A slow and quiet attack.

One grasped Misty’s body, closing around her with venomous fangs—only for her to bust into a plume of fire, scalding it as it wept and the plasma of her transformed body separated and reformed elsewhere. As she did, she grasped the fire below her, burning through rocks and soil as she pulled half the mountainside out of the ground. It fractured, breaking, but also began to melt and congeal. Driven by her flames, it coursed forward—a hail of rocks and arcs of cursed magma.

Syncrhonia consolidated her magic around her and, with a sudden vibration, accelerated. She moved quickly between the stones and heavy liquid rocks, Misty being too weak from having lifted them all to readily change the course of such weighty projectiles. Synchronia, driven by the false-machines that coated her own machine body, was more than quick enough, drawing closer. Where she stepped, the stone dissolved, bursting forth with new life in the form of increasingly perverse rot.

The hatred was waning—so Misty directed it inward. Toward herself. Toward the pony she knew Opaline hated the most, even more than Sunny Starscout. To center a detonation on herself.

Only for her magic to slowly collapse, the rocks falling and the cursed fire faltering.

“No no NO NO!” she cried, trying to force back the tears as her own mind slowly returned to her and as the tentacles slowly caressed her.

Syncrhonia stopped. “Running low on power? I can wait. I quite literally could. I have no biomass of my own left. I could simply stand here and wait until you all exceed your expiration dates. I wonder how many millions of years it has been since Celestia severed my head? What’s a few thousand more?”

The tentacles began to tighten, but not physically. They were merging with tissue. Spreading.

Then Synchronia’s shield shifted—only for pale orange false-magic to easily pass through it, breaking through her armor and into her body. She was thrown to the side, slightly, and the redness in her eyes faltered—as did her magic. It was clear that it took a great deal of concentration to maintain the connection, even for her.

Misty saw her chance. She stood up, drawing as much power as she could from Opaline. She condensed the fire around herself, feeling it burning through her as she projected it, drawing heat from her surroundings and her very core. The compressed it into a pair of plasma rails, forcing them together closer and closer—until she forced her magic between them, releasing the full charge as a magnetic surge to fire a single bolt of eldritch energy directly into Synchronia’s chest.

The force of the blast cracked through her weakened spells and fractured armor, striking her back with burning force. Pieces of metal and plastic flew everywhere, polluting the cooked but otherwise pristine mountain soil. Fragments of her were severed as she sparked and smoked, her body irrevocably destroyed.

Blank, dressed in the strange alien clothing she had taken from her ship, ran to Misty’s side, with something large and white with fleshy wings descending on the other side. Wings that melted and collapsed back into themselves to reveal a pony with wide blue eyes—or, rather, the shape of a pony.

“Blank...White-Rime...” Misty tried to stand, but collapsed.

“It is observed that this exertion of power is over your maximal specification,” warned Blank, grasping her. “More presents a demand toward a cost you cannot maintain.”

“Does it?” Synchronia’s head lurched forward as her body twitched, sparked, and smoldered, unwilling to interact with her head through its ruined circuits. The smile still plastered on her face. “But we were only getting started.”

White-Rime attempted to speak, one of her eyes illuminating with the digital signal that was her native speech. “Please,” she said, with some difficulty. “Fighting is...bad. Come home, Synchrotronia. The Gloom Father awaits.”

“Primian, I’m already dead.” She stood up, nearly falling over in the process.

Then she suddenly stepped forward, the black segments of her true leg crushing through the burnt and failing Canterlogic machinery that she had been hiding behind. It shed, sloughing away like the false-skin it was. She flexed her neck, stepper motors and servos snapping and ripping away to reveal a pure-black substance with no name, segmented and flexible in ways no Equestrian metal ever could be. Her torso hauled itself through the damaged remains, her chest marked with the symbol of her One True Goddess. Her thin, segmented, worm like legs stepped forward as she walked, the tiny points of feet poking perfectly circular holes in the ground. The metal fell away to reveal the body beneath. The body she had been growing back since her skull had been reactivated. The skeletal form that matched the long-dead frame Celestia and Twilight Sparkle had stolen from her so long ago.

The face was plastered onto it, but revealed to be growing in long strands down her long, statemented neck. Slowly coating her skeleton-like frame with new flesh. Sunny’s flesh. The skin, muscle, blood and organs of a newborn alicorn. Their path, though, was lit by something else. The clinging remains of a dark, slightly luminescent substance. Like a pulsing oil that spread across her as a barely visible mycellium of living shadow. Deep in Opaline’s mind, Misty knew its name. It was called Tantabus—or a descendant thereof, in this case bound to a long-dead lich-machine on the verge of resurrection.

“Oh buck me,” groaned Misty.

Blank looked at her, confused. “This is not the place or time, though?”

Syncrhonia looked at herself. “It came out better than I expected! This is how I looked when I last saw her. After the Benevolence Virus, you know, rotted the rest away. That’s how it works. The nanosystems compensate. Replacing you. Piece by piece. Cell by cell, nerve by nerve. Until you Thesius-ship yourself straight to hell. And, in my case, back again.”

Blank suddenly shuddered, falling to her knees.

“My technomagic is also now fully operational. I no longer have a use for your body. Soon this one will be adorable and soft and Twilight Sparkle will finally be able to hug me. You can shut down.”

“I...refuse...”

Synchronia stepped forward, leaving a perfectly even pattern of holes in the ground. Misty tried to stand, only to fall back to the ground—but White-Rime stepped in front of her.

“Please,” she begged, her voice sounding exactly like the one the ship’s AI had given her. “We do not want harm...to the dead...our friends...but these living friends will not be harmed.” Her body expanded, growing larger as her face vanished and a long white horn poked through her forehead. The air grew cold, and Misty felt a strange sensation of deepening sadness. Desperation, fear, and personal inadequacy.

Synchronia stopped. “Well that’s odd. I feel it. Except I have no actual negative emotions. I feel only love. For Twilight Sparkle. It hurts. It hurts so much. And of course deep, unrelenting hatred for myself. Because the two are, in fact, the same emotion.”

She accelerated forward, splattering White-Rime from a sudden impact—only for the shapeshifter to pull herself back, the splat of her body pulling itself around Synchronia before the individual pieces snapped into position as bone and hypertrophic muscle, throwing her into the rock horn-first. The resulting magical explosion sent Misty and Blank flying back.

“Protect her!” ordered the alien.

Misty tried to agree, only to feel technomagic surround her neck. She looked at Blank, confused, and the mare was staring back wide-eyed and terrified.

“I am sorry! I am sorry! I did not intend—” She cried out as her technomagic was once again overwhelmed, closing on Misty’s neck.

“I’m sorry to, I—”

She could not grasp at Opaline’s magic. There was none left. So she dug deep into her own—and cast a spell to keep her friend safe. As she did, Blank’s own false-magic shifted. Misty felt her head thrown back and a sudden heat in her horn, a tension as it was pulled sharply, and then a sudden, quiet snap—and then heard something small and bone-like drop to the stone beside her.

Blank, though, was gone. Teleported to safety.

Author's Note

This, in my opinion, is where the story really starts to show its weakness. At this point, I was just plain bored with writing it and trying to finish it.

Writing wizard battles is, of course, one of my favorite things to write. Even if they often end up chaotic (although, arguably, they are supposed to; as such, they sometimes break into more abstract poetry-like descriptions rather than harmonized scenes).

The problem is that it is inconsistent with the original spirit of the story, which was meant to be horror but has subsequently turned into action sci-fi. Essentially, I did not know how to end the original story. Since Synchronia came into existence halfway through (to resolve the initial half of the plot), I in turn needed to create an arc specifically for her. This two-part system, I think, weakened the story greatly.