Daughter of Death

As Twilight entered the lair, she saw that the walls, floor, and ceiling were made of the same black stone as she saw outside, and it looked like Thanatos didn't put the effort of making bricks like she did, so the surfaces were just flat, smooth stone, with the skeletons holding torches on the walls being the only decoration.

Then the doors closed.

The exact same instant, a firewall appeared behind Twilight and began to rapidly advance. She could see the skeletons hanging on the walls turn to ash the instant they touched it, so she ran as fast as she could. She was able to distance the trap, only for a second firewall to appear just before her, and she almost ran right into. Thankfully, this firewall wasn’t moving toward her. However, she was now trapped.

She quickly thought of what she could do to get out of this situation, listing all the spells she learned, and understood that she had to teleport. However, she wasn’t powerful enough yet to teleport. Thankfully, she had the Staff of Sacanas.

Before the journey, she took time to absorb the magic from all her undead unicorns, without touching the magic holding them together. In addition to the staff’s magic, it was a lot. So she focused on the staff, and she was able to teleport to the other side of the firewall.

Only for the ceiling to drop on her. She barely avoided being crushed thanks to a last moment roll forward. Suddenly, the floor opened before her, revealing acid for at least ten meters. Again, she found herself stuck, and another piece of ceiling was dropping on her, slower.

Thinking quickly, she gave herself butterfly wings, allowing her to fly only for circular saws to come out of the walls and ceiling, trying to cut her into pieces that would fall into the acid. There were too many of them, moving back and forth, so she ended up having to use shields with the help of the staff. The saws created a lot of pressure on the shields, quickly breaking them, but they gained enough time to allow her to pass and reach the end of the acid trap.

Now, she was in a room, very dark because of the absence of torches (but she could still see very well thanks to her night vision), surrounded by at least one hundred skeletons. They were all earth ponies, armed with clubs and armored with full body armors. The armors had skull-shaped spiked helmets with the ‘mouth’ open so the skeletons could hold the clubs in their mouths, and the rest was also covered in spikes. It must be very heavy, but it didn’t bother the skeletons at all, except maybe reducing their mobility a bit. The only part of the skeleton that was visible beside the teeth was the tail poking through a hole.

Quickly, Twilight fired a beam from the staff at the nearest skeleton, blowing it up as well as several skeletons around it.

They had no magic resistance at all.

However, their number was problematic, and the ceiling of the room had lowered so she couldn’t hope of using her butterfly wings to fly and attack them from out of range.

In just a few seconds, she had dozens of skeletons attacking her, and her shield was getting overwhelmed. She still managed to fire a couple of beams creating explosions. smaller ones, so she wouldn’t get caught in them, but also meaning that only one skeleton ended up destroyed.

In the end, she teleported to a corner of the room where no skeletons were present, then charged magic with the staff before she fired it in the form of a continuous beam that swept the room. The beam cut through all the skeletons and their armors like through butter, even going through the walls.

It used a lot of magic, but much less than if she had continued to fire explosive beams while teleporting around and using shields.

When the skeletons dropped dead, Twilight sighed in relief and, seeing that nothing else was coming, sat down. The ceiling returned to its place, five meters up instead of just above the skeletons' heads.

Goldie arrived beside her. “Woah. I could barely keep up with everything that was going on. All that training did you good.”

“Yeah.”

Goldie then looked around, seeing that there were no less than six exits. Two at the left, two at the right, and two at the front, without counting where they came from. It looked like this lair was a real maze.

But then, a circular hole opened in the ceiling, and out of it came a circular piece of floor that floated down toward the center of the room.

“An elevator?”

“Seems like it,” Twilight said. “I may not have to explore this maze in the end. Seeing the size of this mountain, it wouldn’t have been fun.”

“Do you think it will lead us right to the Staff of Thanatos?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Or at least, it will let us pass most of the lair.”

At that, Twilight walked toward the elevator that was floating a few centimeters above the ground, then jumped on it. Right away, the elevator rose, passing through the hole. For several seconds, Twilight ascended through a shaft before the elevator reached the end and stopped in the center of another room.

This room was much larger, easily one hundred meters wide, with square pillars every twenty meters.

There were skeletons everywhere on the floor, of various creatures, various equines, griffins, minotaurs, yaks, and many others. More skeletons holding torches were present on the pillars and the walls, but despite them, the room was rather dark.

Then, Twilight saw the reason why the room was so large, and she would have probably peed on herself if she had still been alive.

Before her was a dragon skeleton, with a veeeeery long serpentine body, with twenty legs, ten wings, and five heads that were looking at her as if she was their next meal. Worst of all, it was armored.

Even Goldie looked terrified. “What is this monster?!”

“I AM LEVIATHAN!”one of the heads answered.

“BORN FROM THE FUSION OF THE SKELETONS OF FIVE DRAGONS!” another head continued.

“THE GUARDIAN OF MASTER THANATOS’ THRONE!” a third head spoke.

“AND YOUR LAST TRIAL!” a fourth head said.

“SO TRY TO DEFEAT ME, YOU WHO DESIRES THE MASTER’S POWER!” the last head finished.

Then fire appeared inside the jaws of the five heads, and with a scream, Twilight ran behind one of the pillars just before she would be carbonized. She could see the pillar melting into lava! And when the fire stopped, so was the floor too!

Twilight moved from behind the pillar and fired a beam at one of the heads. However, the beam bounced from the helmet and instead went to explode on one of the pillars.

Of course this armor was magic resistant.

“How am I supposed to defeat you?!” she yelled.

“EITHER FIND A SOLUTION, OR DIE TRYING!” one of the heads answered while another readied another fire breath.

She could only see one solution: target the joints of the armor.

But first…

With the help of the Staff of Sacanas, while avoiding the fire breaths, she began to reanimate the skeletons in the room. Thanks to the accumulated power of the staff and of the magic of the unicorns it absorbed, she could reanimate large groups of skeletons at once, and she sent them to attack Leviathan, distracting him. Then, she teleported on his back, placed the head of the staff in one of the joints, and fired. There was an explosion inside the armor, but it clearly wasn’t enough to take down the huge beast. She had to teleport away to avoid being chewed by one of the heads.

She resumed animating skeletons.

“Twilight! Can’t you do what Thanatos did to create this dragon hybrid? I think that you learned that just before we left the lair!” Goldie exclaimed.

“I only learned to merge two skeletons! I would need to merge all the skeletons in the room to hope to create something that could go face to face against that thing!”

“Give it a try, at least! With your staff, you should do better!”

Goldie was right, it was her best bet.

So she reanimated all the skeletons in the room as rapidly as she could, teleporting and flying with her butterfly wings to avoid Leviathan and his attacks, then began to work in merging them. Their bones broke apart, floating in the air, before they began to gather to create new forms. She identified all the bones and where to put them to create… she didn’t know what. However, despite the Staff of Sacanas, she was limited in how many bones she could manipulate at once, so she had to wait to place bones before she could broke apart more skeletons.

Because of that, it was a very lengthy process.

And Leviathan wasn’t waiting.

So Goldie acted. Looking around, he found the skeleton of a unicorn, and took possession of it. Now in control of this new body, he levitated a sword on the floor and ran toward Leviathan.

One of the heads reported its attention on him and breathed fire. Goldie avoided it by rolling aside before he continued. Reaching the dragon, he began to climb him, first a leg, then the chest, then a neck. The head tried to shake him off, but he resisted and continued to climb until he was on the head’s snoot. Then, clearly to Leviathan’s surprise, Goldie jumped into the mouth, doing it quick before it could close, and now, he was inside the dragon and, more importantly, inside the armor.

Goldie immediately began to hack and slash at the straps holding the armor together.

While Leviathan was clearly angry at what he was doing as he was beginning to lose pieces of armor, he reported his attention back to Twilight as she continued to merge skeletons.

What she was making was a creature currently about half the size of the dragon, standing on its back legs, with claws. Each of its bones were amalgamations of countless bones that had often nothing to do with each other, leg bones, arm bones, spines, ribs, skulls, and so on. The only reason all these bones were remaining together forming bigger bones was thanks to magic.

One day, she will learn to truly merge bones, but it wasn’t today. Thanatos didn’t look like he could do it too despite all his power, or Leviathan would have looked like a normal dragon, but bigger, instead of the fusion between a hydra and a centipede. It looked like only Grogar had been able to shape bones into what he wanted.

Seeing that Leviathan was about to attack her, Twilight stopped merging more skeletons into her creature and sent it to attack the dragon, quickly giving it a piece of her soul.

The creature… She will name it Creature. Creature ran toward Leviathan, then jumped against a pillar to avoid a fire breath, only to bounce off the pillar to avoid another breath. With a roll upon landing, it avoided a third breath, then reached Leviathan where it proceeded to start to use its claws to pull the armor pieces apart. One of the heads tried to bite its head off, so Creature punched it before it resumed tearing the armor apart. Between it and Goldie still inside, the armor was quickly losing pieces.

The chestplate eventually fell, exposing the dragon’s torso and revealing Goldie.

However, Leviathan sent Creature flying with a swipe of his left foreleg, and Creature crashed against a pillar. Leviathan then charged at it before it could recover, and both Creature and the pillar exploded when the dragon crashed into them.

By now, the structural integrity of the room was very compromised, so it wasn’t surprising that part of the ceiling collapsed on Leviathan, revealing the sky. It wasn’t enough to take down Leviathan however, and the dragon looked around to see where Twilight was.

Did she end up crushed by the ceiling collapsing on her? Or did she teleport away, giving up the fight now that her creature was destroyed?

What he didn’t know, however, was that Twilight used the big opening left by the chestplate to teleport inside the dragon, beside Goldie.

Then, she began to absorb Leviathan’s magic with the Staff of Sacanas.

Leviathan felt it and looked at his torso in panic, seeing Twilight and what she was doing. He went to grab her to stop her, only for Goldie to put her on his back before transporting her further down into the dragon’s long serpentine body, out of reach, making him roar in rage.

He prepared a breath, but he didn’t have time to complete it. The magic holding him together and fueling the breath was disappearing, and the fire extinguished inside his jaw. Little by little, Leviathan’s body broke apart inside the armor, then collapsed. It wasn’t long before the purple flames inside the heads’ eye sockets disappeared.

Twilight teleported out of the remains, and Goldie followed her, having left his possessed body behind.

At this moment, two huge doors opened.

Twilight sighed in relief. “We did it.”

Goldie couldn’t stop himself from laughing. “I got myself eaten by a dragon! I can’t believe it!”

Twilight giggled. “What you did was crazy!”

“I know, right! If you had told me that I would jump into the mouth of a dragon, I would have told you to go into an asylum!”

“I guess that it helps that you are dead dead, so you don’t have to worry about dying even more.”

“True.”

Twilight rubbed her muzzle against his. “You were awesome.”

“Thanks. You were too. That creature you made was really cool. Too bad I couldn’t see much of it before it was killed.”

“Thank you.”

Goldie then moved toward the doors which opened. “Come on! Let’s go! we’re almost there!”

Twilight followed him.

The room behind the doors revealed to be even bigger than the one they just left, again with pillars.

And it was absolutely filled with skeletons. Thousands, maybe even dozens of thousands of them of all kinds surrounding a throne on top of some stairs on which another skeleton was sitting.

Twilight and Goldie approached the throne, keeping an eye on the skeletons in case they would get up and attack. Thankfully, they reached the throne without incident.

They now had a good look of the skeleton sitting on the throne. It was a unicorn with a golden necklace with a black skull-shaped crystal around the neck.

Its eye sockets were empty.

In a cross, it was also holding a scythe and a staff that Twilight immediately recognized.

She was attracted by the staff. By the black skull on it. She could feel its power. She wasn’t sure why, but it comforted her. It called her.

“Twilight?”

Hearing her name got her out of her trance, and she shook her head before she looked behind her, toward the entrance of the room. There, she saw Death Speaker, still riding the manticore which was walking toward her, his vulture, like always, on his shoulder.

“Master Speaker? What are you doing here?”

“I saw part of the top of the mountain collapse, then the ward around the mountain disappeared soon after and I was able to fly here. I got worried about you. Did you really manage to defeat that beast outside this room?”

“Yeah, it wasn’t easy, but I was able to absorb the magic holding it together with the Staff of Sacanas.”

“Impressive. Very impressive. You did good to keep this staff.”

The manticore reached the bottom of the stairs, and Death Speaker descended from its back before he climbed them.

“And now, you succeeded.”

Once at the top, he looked at the skeleton on the throne.

“Thanatos… And his staff. Here it is.”

“Yeah.”

Without waiting, Death Speaker went to grab the staff.

Twilight wanted to stop him. She could feel that this staff was hers to take and keep. But Death Speaker needed this staff to not die.

Finally, the staff was in the minotaur’s hand. Then, grinning, he raised it, and magic came out of it, enveloping him. Before Twilight’s eye sockets, he was growing younger. His fur went from a grayed black to pitch black, his hair and beard went from gray to black too, and even his eyes returned to normal, revealing green pupils. He gained muscles, and also several centimeters.

Once it was over, the magic disappearing, he spread his arms apart and took a huge breath before sighing.

“Aaah… It feels GOOD to be young again!”

A very happy Twilight hugged him around the leg. “We did it! You won’t die!”

Death Speaker chuckled. “Yes. I won’t die. Thanks to you.”

Then, he looked down at her for a moment before his smile disappeared. Then, with a small move of his leg, he made her release him before he began to walk away.

“Now, our paths separate.”

All happiness immediately left the filly, replaced by surprise and incomprehension. “W-what? W-w-wait! What do you mean? You won’t return to the lair with me?”

“No. I won’t. I have no need to return there.”

“W… Why?!”

“Because I don’t need you anymore.”

Twilight couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “But… But…”

Death Speaker stopped walking and sighed before he looked at Twilight with eyes that she couldn’t read. “Listen. Here is my most important lesson. A necromancer worth its salt only trusts in themself. And it’s even more the case for a lich. You should have never trusted me. All this time, I have been using you for my own goal. Now that you have done your part, I have no reason to remain with you.”

The filly was silent, looking at the minotaur in shock.

Beside her, Goldie yelled, “You are lying! There’s no way you don’t care about her! You risked your life to protect her!”

Death Speaker snorted. “Of course I protected her. Without her, I was doomed.” He then resumed walking toward the exit. “Also, you don’t need me anymore. You can perfectly continue your lessons by yourself, as you proved while I was in the hospital. And you can keep my stuff, as well as Sunshine. I’m starting a new life. Goodbye.”

Then, he raised the staff, and in a flash, he teleported away.

Goldie looked at where the minotaur disappeared in rage, then quickly went to hug Twilight who was remaining immobile.

“Don’t listen to him. You can trust in others. There are bad apples, but there are people who are genuinely your friends, like me. And I’m sure that you can add Fizzlepop and Grubber in the list. And I’m sure that you will have many more friends in the future.”

“Believe what you want, but the minotaur is right. You can’t let something like trust get in the way,” a new voice, smooth and calming, suddenly appeared behind them.

Gasping, Twilight and Goldie turned around to look at the skeleton on the throne.

Its eye sockets now had purple flames.

“The life of a lich is defined by one thing: loneliness. We can’t have such things as friends,” it said.

Then, it rose from its throne, and darkness appeared to cloak it while its scythe levitated at its side.

Thanatos stared at Twilight, and being a skeleton, it was impossible to say what his expression was.

“Welcome, Princess of the Dead.”