Daughter of Death

by Lucar

Rating: teen
Tags: Horror, Adventure, Violence, Twilight Sparkle, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Death, Original Character
Length: 50917

That day was supposed to be perfect. She would enter Celestia's School For Gifted Unicorns. Instead, Twilight Sparkle wakes up in a mortuary.

Twilight Sparkle took her entrance exam. Then there was a rainbow light, and everything went to Tartarus. The next thing she knows, she wakes up inside a mortuary.

Thus begins her new destiny as the daughter of Death.

Tags may be added later.

Filly Twilich story.

This is a story that I will work on when I'm not focused on HoH:UME and Tales From The Omniverse, so new chapters probably won't come as often.

December 4th 2024: the story is already featured! Yay! Thank you, everyone!

Published 2024-12-04 04:00:00 UTC
Last updated 2025-01-15 20:47:02 UTC

Chapter 1

Author's Note

Here is a new surprise story that has nothing to do with UME! Tadaa! I don't promise that Sweetie Void may not appear later, but her appearance should be at least rather minor.

Also, for once, it is not a crossover. So, I may have more difficulty working on this fic, but I will try my best.

I hope you will like it.

Chapter 1

Twilight Sparkle woke up in total darkness, inside what she felt was a bag, with a gasp. She sat up suddenly, only to hit her head with a metallic ceiling judging by the sound.

Confused, she immediately panicked and tried to get out of the bag, only to fail, and she constantly hit her legs against the metallic ceiling and metallic walls.

So not only was she trapped inside a bag, she was also trapped inside a metallic box.

“Help! Somepony help!”

She had no idea where she was, and she had no idea how she ended up here. The last thing she remembered was that she had been taking the entrance exam to Celestia’s School For Gifted Unicorns, and she had been failing, when a rainbow light appeared, and suddenly, she surged.

She hatched the egg that she had been supposed to hatch, made the baby dragon inside grow until its head went through the ceiling, made the teachers levitate, turned her parents into potted plants, felt the most intense pain ever, and then… darkness.

And here she woke up, wherever ‘here’ was. And whenever ‘here’ was too.

Still calling for help, she trashed in the bag, wondering what happened to her.

Then, after what felt like an eternity, she heard a creaking.

Somepony opened the box!

“I can’t believe it!” she heard before whatever she was on was pulled out with her. “Don’t worry, I’m getting you out of there.” Then, a zipper was pulled down, and she finally saw light. “But it’s impossible… Body bags are airtight… There is no way… Even if…”

Calming down, Twilight looked to her side at the muttering blue unicorn stallion who got her out, a doctor judging by the white smock.

“Thank you mister. Where am I? What happened? Why was I in a bag inside a box?” she asked.

At the last question, she looked at the box, which revealed to actually be some kind of locker.

She looked down at the bag, seeing that it was white.

She immediately recognized what it was.

What the stallion said caught up to her.

A body bag.

She looked back at the doctor, panic returning.

“Why was I in a body bag?”

The doctor looked back at her, more exactly at her eyes, and he was visibly sweating.

Then, he placed his hoof against her neck, and kept it here for several seconds.

He paled, his eyes turned into pinpricks, then screamed and ran out of the room.

“H-hey! Come back! What’s going on?!” she called, to no avail.

He… He was taking her pulse? Why…? What…?

A body bag…

This locker, it looked like one of these coolers inside morgues, where they store the bodies.

A body bag… was airtight. How did she survive in it without suffocating?

When she hit her head, she felt no pain…

She was feeling so cold… Was it the room, or because she just came out of what looked like a cooler? Or…

He took her pulse… Shouldn’t she be feeling her heartbeat against her chest with how much she was scared?

Not wanting to believe the conclusion she was coming to, she slowly put her hoof against her opposite leg, where she knew a vein was present.

Nothing.

“No…”

She looked around at the room.

At the mortuary.

Her breathing became erratic.

She tried to crawl out of the body bag, only to fall from the metallic tray linked to her cooler.

No pain.

“No… No…! M-mommy! Daddy! Shiny!”

She ran out of the room.

“See? I told you! She is dead, and yet, she is alive!” she then heard, and she stopped as she saw the doctor from before with several other doctors. “She woke up inside a cooler, in her own body bag!”

The doctors looked at each other. Then, one said, “C-come on. A zombie, really? There is no way. She is just a filly who was believed to be dead but was actually just in a coma.”

“SHE HAS NO PULSE!” the first doctor yelled. “And look at her eyes! Their dilatation is not natural! And you mean to tell me that Princess Celestia couldn’t tell if a filly was just in a coma instead of being dead?”

“Uh…”

Princess Celestia herself confirmed that she was…?

“N-no! No! I-I’m not dead!” she said, more to herself than to the doctors. “I can’t… I can’t… I’m not dead!” She was starting to cry. No tears were coming. “I’m not… I’m not… I… I want my mommy…”

The doctors exchanged looks again, hesitating. One took a step forward, wanting to reassure her, but stopped herself.

“So, is she an undead or not?”

“I’m telling you! She is! If you want proof, then go feel her pulse!”

…

“Should… we lock her and call Princess Celestia? She probably knows what to do to an undead.”

“She will probably put her to rest. The dead should remain dead.”

Twilight gasped upon hearing that, then immediately ran past the doctors. They didn’t have time to react.

“Hey! Wait!”

She found the stairs and climbed them. Mortuaries were generally in basements, so if she wanted to leave, she had to take them.

Once on the first floor, she randomly ran in the hallways, passing medical staff and patients. Eventually, she found the exit and passed the door, getting outside.

She could see that it was late in the afternoon. No more than a few hours must have passed since the exam. Unless a whole day passed.

Her face was feeling stiff…

Oh. Oooh… Rigor mortis started at the face after a few hours.

So it really meant she was…

Twilight shook her head, stopping thinking about it.

She looked around, recognizing where she was. She went to this hospital a couple of times. She… didn’t remember the path between here and her house however…

But… should she even go to her house? How will her parents react if they see her? She was… And it was the first place Princess Celestia will look at once she learned about her.

She didn’t want to die…

But she wanted her mommy, and her daddy, and her BBBFF, and Smarty Pants.

Behind her, the doors burst open, and the same doctors as before came out.

“There she is!”

She immediately bolted out of here, into the streets of Canterlot.

“Stop her!”

Thankfully, nopony reacted in time to follow the doctors’ orders.

She ran as fast as she could, which was surprisingly fast, faster than she ever ran. There was no doubt that she would feel pain in her legs by running this fast, but she felt nothing. She almost crashed into ponies more than once as a result.

She ran for a while, taking random streets, until she felt that she was far enough from her pursuers.

And now, she had no idea where she was.

And she had no idea what to do.

She saw her reflection in the glass of the window of a shop, allowing her to finally see her dilated pupils. She also saw the rest of her body, and she spotted something that she couldn’t believe.

Gasping, she looked at her flank, and there it was, her very own Cutie Mark.

A unicorn pony skull with a six-branched purple starburst on the forehead, around the horn, the skull surrounded by five white smaller stars.

She… wasn’t sure how to react. She was overjoyed to get her Cutie Mark, but at what cost? And… a pony skull for a Cutie Mark didn’t look very… nice. What, was she fated to be the next Grogar? She didn’t want that. She recognized the starburst, it was the symbol of magic itself. So, a skull with that on the forehead… It could mean something very bad for Equestria, and even the world.

More reason for Princess Celestia to get rid of her. She probably thought that it was a good thing that she died when she saw her Cutie Mark.

She… really was dead, uh?

She put her hoof on her heart, not feeling any heartbeat.

Since she gasped, she hadn’t breathed once, and she didn’t feel the need to breathe again. She immediately resumed breathing on her own.

She was dead.

She was…

She ran into a nearby alley. Then, once she was far enough into the darkness, she collapsed and curled into a ball.

It had been supposed to be the best day of her life…

It turned out to be the worst.

She wasn’t sure how long she remained like that. When she decided to move, more of her body felt stiff, and the sky turned orange.

She wanted to remain here and pretend that the world outside this alley didn’t exist, but she had to find a place to hide for the next couple of days, and this alley may not be enough.

She got up with some difficulty, then slowly walked out of the alley, her front legs having difficulty.

The streets were now emptier. Good.

She began to walk, with no idea where she was going.

It was as the sun disappeared beyond the horizon and the sky darkened that she found a promising place. An empty house, for sale.

Looking around to see if there was anypony, she used her magic to open a window and climb inside, closing the window behind her.

She explored the house, finding a wall closet. She entered it and closed the door, trapping herself in darkness.

Then she lied down and waited, just herself and her thoughts.

Thinking was all she will be able to do for the next few days.

And she had a lot to think about.

…

If only she at least had her Smarty Pants.

Chapter 2

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Chapter 3

She was dead…

She was now a walking corpse…

Twilight was familiar with death. It was just last year that she had to say goodbye to her Grandpa Blue Star, her dad’s dad, to some sickness. It wasn’t long after that she learned that her mom lost her parents to an accident when Twilight had been just one year old. Now, all that remained was Grandma Sunlight.

After Grandpa Blue Star’s death, Twilight learned everything she could about death. She really found it fascinating. Well, the mystery behind death, not… what happened to a body after death. What was the afterlife? Ponies called it the Great Golden Plain, but there was no proof that it was really what they described, it was just belief. Did souls reincarnate as some ponies said? Would she have found Grandpa Blue Star and her mom’s parents after dying? Were they watching her?

Those were all questions she had wished to find the answer to.

Ponies knew that the soul existed, and so, that there was an afterlife. Necromancy proved it. But necromancers never managed to find out what was the Great Beyond.

She had wanted to help find out, but necromancy had been far from her mind. Ponies didn’t like necromancy. It is yucky. You play with the dead. She really didn’t want that. And that caused her to be quite torn on the subject. She wanted to find out more about the afterlife, but the only means to know was necromancy.

And now, here she was, an undead, with a Cutie Mark that said that she was apparently a very good necromancer.

Worse: she was a lich.

One known as the Lich Emperor of Eterna was a popular villain in a series of books known as Light’s Quest that Twilight followed. He was extremely powerful, to the point that he commanded dozens of others, less powerful liches, and he ruled over the undead that he used to conquer the world and try to stop the hero, Little Light, and his friends. He always had his scepter, the Soul Devourer, a powerful artefact in which he bound his soul. Little Light fought him once and the Lich Emperor almost killed him before he managed to escape with the sacrifice of one of his friends (a popular character at that).

Needless to say, Twilight didn’t want to be a lich.

She didn’t want to be an undead.

She didn’t want to be dead.

Being a necromancer… would suck, but she could accept that. But dead…

She was a monster…

She was feeling so cold… It was the same cold she felt when she touched her dead grandpa.

What will her family think? They will probably scream at her and bring her to Princess Celestia.

She was alone.

“Ah! There she is!!” she suddenly heard.

What? A colt? What was a colt doing here? So late? She didn’t even hear the door of the closet opening. She thought that nopony had seen her enter this house.

“...Uh? Why doesn’t she move? Is she sleeping?..... Uh. She isn’t even breathing. Is she dead? Mmh… What do I do now?”

Twilight tried to open her eyes, but she couldn’t. Her eye muscles were as stiff as the rest of her body. She couldn’t talk. She couldn’t even move her ears to show that she heard the colt. Her whole body was as stiff as a board.

No, wait, she could still move her tail a bit. But did she even dare to try? The colt saw that she was dead. If she suddenly moved, the colt would run away screaming about zombies and alert the whole neighborhood. And she couldn’t move to escape.

“Why do I feel drawn to her?”

What? Why would a colt be drawn to her? Was it her magic, somehow? Why?

She moved her tail.

She could almost hear the colt stiffening.

“Did she move? No way, she is dead, right?”

Twilight hesitated, then moved her tail again.

“Yep, she moved. Wait… Can you hear me?”

Hearing that the colt wasn’t running away screaming, Twilight got more confident and moved her tail up and down.

“Uh… Is that a yes?”

Tail up and down.

“Uh… You can just move your tail? You can’t even talk?”

Up and down.

“Weird. Why can’t you move and talk? Oh, you can’t answer that. Well, uh… You are dead, yet you move, so… are you a zombie?”

Close enough. Up and down.

Her tail was getting a bit harder to move. She could tell that it was a matter of minutes before she couldn’t move anymore at all.

“Woah. I didn’t expect to see a zombie filly in Canterlot one day. At least, you seem to be a nice one, not like the brain-eating zombies we see in stories. Well, nice to meet you! My name is Golden Crown. But I don’t like this name, so call me Goldie.”

Uh? With a name like that, was he the colt of a noble? What was he doing here away from the castle and the big manors where the nobles lived?

Still, it was nice that there was a colt that wasn’t screaming when discovering that she was an undead. Maybe he loved zombies.

How could she tell him that she will not be able to move soon?

Maybe by moving her tail and making it slow down little by little until stopping?

She did so.

“Uh… What are you trying to tell me? Your tail slows down… Are you saying that you won’t be able to move your tail?”

Up and down.

“Oh. So you won’t be able to move anymore. That’s… sad… Will you be able to move again eventually?”

Up and down.

“But until then, you are stuck here, like this?”

Up and down.

“Darn, that sucks. I can’t imagine what it would be like to not be able to move for hours, or even days, or who knows how long you will remain like that. Well, lucky for you that I am here! I will keep you company!”

Twilight was thankful, but didn’t this colt have a family? It was already suspicious that he was here so late. She so wanted to ask about that.

“So, I know Canterlot like the back of my hoof. I have explored every little corners of this city, and even a bit beyond the wall. I also have that habit of entering houses. I entered at least half the houses of Canterlot.”

What?

“Like, this house, for example. I entered it when somepony lived here. A couple of unicorns. The stallion had a room full of dolls that he was collecting, it was hilarious! I thought at first that it was the mare, but no! It was the stallion! I saw him hugging the dolls and brushing them and giving them clothes and all! He was more dedicated than a filly!”

Twilight had to admit, imagining a full grown stallion taking care of dolls was funny.

“Then there is the house just beside it. An old mare lives there, and she loves telling stories to her grandchildren when they visit. I listened to a couple of them. Then there is that house where…”

Goldie spent the next… She-had-no-idea-how-long recounting every anecdote about the houses he visited and the ponies living inside them. When he was done, he revealed that he was a prankster, and his favorite victims were the nobles.

“They are so snuck up that they just ask to be messed with. Except that Fancy Pants guy and his wife Fleur de Lys. They are very nice, so I leave them alone. And of course, I don’t touch Princess Celestia and her niece Princess Cadance. Prince Blueblood however… Ah! He is just a colt, but I already love playing with him! He screams like a girl!”

Goldie then proceeded to tell some information about himself. He liked blue but didn’t like pink. His Cutie Mark was a sword, meaning that his special talent was being a Royal Guard.

“Also, you can’t see me with your eyes closed, so let me tell you that I’m a unicorn, I have a golden-colored coat with a purple mane and tail, and I have brown eyes.”

Nice to finally have a picture of the colt in her mind.

But really. Shouldn’t Goldie have returned to his family by now? How late was it? Or was it morning by now? She really couldn’t tell.

“As you can guess from my Cutie Mark, I loved to play with a sword. A wooden sword, of course. I dreamed of becoming a Royal Guard and serving Princess Celestia, even if my parents didn’t want that… Uh… Sorry, I don’t like talking about my parents. Especially my father. Now there’s one guy that deserved to be sent to Tartarus.”

That bad?

“Anyway. I really wish that you could talk. I really want to know more about you. And I’m curious to know how you became a zombie. Hopefully, you will be able to talk again soon.”

She doubted. Rigor mortis will start disappearing in the lower body, so starting with the tail, and ending with the head. So she will not be able to talk or open her eyes for a while.

“I wish that I could help. You really look like a corpse with you not moving at all. Can you still move your tail?”

Twilight didn’t think so, but she still tried. As expected, her tail didn’t move.

After a few seconds, Goldie said, “Guess not. Well, uh… Wait, I haven’t seen your Cutie Mark yet, I haven’t paid attention, sorry. So… Uh? A skull? Waaait… Are you a necromancer?”

He didn’t mind the undead part, so hopefully…

“That’s cool. I don’t know much about necromancy, but I guess that explains you being a zombie, and why I’m drawn to you.”

What?

“Now I REALLY want to know more about you. But… you can’t move and talk, and still no idea how long it will last. Mmh… How to pass time? Oh! I can try to tell you a story! This should help to pass a lot of time, and I know lots of stories that I heard from ponies or read in books above somepony’s back. So, first, once upon a time…”

And so, Goldie began to tell stories. Sometimes, they were children stories, the kind you read to foals to put them to sleep. Sometimes, they were more mature stories, like Light’s Quest. He rarely remembered the whole story word for word, so he often made up by simply telling what happened next.

If only Twilight could sleep…

Still, it was effective, she could feel the hours pass. Goldie eventually went away and came back, confirming that it was morning. Then he continued with his stories. Eventually, however, he ran out of stories, so he made up new ones with him as the hero, and Twilight as the princess he had to save. He didn’t know her name, so he called her “Princess Purple”. It made Twilight want to giggle.

He made sure that the stories were long ones, with lots of adventures and obstacles and terrible villains. And of course, lots of exaggerations. In his stories, Goldie could pretty much do anything, and the villains were so stupid and evil and stupidly evil. Again, Twilight wanted to laugh. Very often. Was he doing this on purpose?

Time passed, Goldie never stopping with his stories. Didn’t he need to pee by now? Wasn’t he hungry? Or tired?

Regularly, she tried to move her tail to see if the rigor mortis was disappearing.

Eventually, after many long hours, she felt her tail moving, barely.

Goldie didn’t see that, as he was busy being a dork, judging by what he was saying.

“I do SWOOSH and SWOOSH and SWOOSH, and I pierce the goblin chief in the heart, killing him! His minions immediately scatter in panic! MWAHAHA!”

The first thing she would tell him once she could talk again was that heroes didn’t laugh like that.

Later, she moved her tail again. Better. She could also move her back legs a bit.

She moved her tail until she gained Goldie’s attention.

“Uh? Woah! Your tail is moving! Yes! You can move again! Is it just your tail?”

She moved her back legs a bit.

“Cool! So you can move the rest of your body again little by little. Almost there! I can’t wait for you to be able to talk again! But until then, I guess that I will continue my stories.”

Sadly, the colt was clearly running out of inspiration, because his stories were starting to repeat themselves. Still better than the absolute silence she had expected when she entered this closet.

Hours passed, and Twilight could move her body more and more. As soon as she could move her front legs again, she used them to slowly sit up. Then, a few hours later, she felt that she could move her mouth again, but it was still too stiff to speak correctly. Not long after, she opened her eyes, only to see darkness.

She expected to see the closet’s door open, with Goldie standing there. Had he closed the door to remain with her in the darkness?

But then, how could he see her in this darkness? His horn wasn’t even lit with a light spell.

His voice was coming from her left, so she looked in his direction, obviously seeing nothing.

He was so happy.

“Yes! Yes! Yes! Come on! You still can’t talk?”

Twilight moved her jaw, showing her difficulty in doing so.

“Oh. Well, only a few more hours, right?”

Twilight nodded slowly.

She will probably still feel stiff for a while, but her ability to talk should return quickly, even if not perfectly at first.

It was not long after that she tried.

“You… laugh… like… a… vil… lain… Not… a… he… ro.”

Silence followed.

Then Goldie burst into laughter.

“Oh… Oh my Celestia! You can talk again, and the first thing you say is that I laugh badly! Oh my gosh! I can’t…!”

As he continued laughing, Twilight couldn’t stop herself from joining.

“But… I’m… right.”

Goldie calmed down. “Y-yeah. That’s true. I really sounded like a villain. The irony! A hero with a villain laugh!”

He resumed laughing.

After a while, they both calmed down.

“I… am… Twi… light… Spar… kle.”

“Now that’s a better first thing to say. And also “Nice to meet you.””

Twilight giggled.

“So, why couldn’t you move?”

“Ri… gor… mor… tis… Corpse… can’t… move… af… ter… dy… ing.”

“Really? Why?”

Twilight then slowly began an explanation about adenosine triphosphate and how the body after death stops producing it which causes the muscles to become stiff. And that was the summary.

Clearly, most of the explanation passed above Goldie’s head.

“W-well. Okay. So, to summarize it, you are an egghead.”

“Hey!”

“Relax, I find it adorable. Or, I guess that I would say, adorkable.”

Twilight pouted. “You… are… the… dork!”

“Dork!”

“Dork!”

…

“Pfft!”

Suddenly, the two laughed.

“I guess we are both dorks.”

“Yeah.”

Silence followed. Then, Twilight decided that it was time to open the closet. She wanted to see Goldie.

She searched a bit in the dark for the knob, then found it and turned it, opening the door.

There wasn’t much light that entered. It was night again.

She exited the closet, then looked behind her to see if Goldie was following.

There he was.

Transparent.

…

Twilight moved her leg toward him, and it passed through his body.

Goldie smirked.

Twilight stared at her leg, then at his face in horror.

“Boo.”

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!”

With a scream, Twilight jumped backward, falling on her butt.

“Ghost! Y-you…!”

Goldie burst into laughter again. “Surprise! I thought that you would have caught on by now that something was wrong with me.”

“W-well… Uh…”

She never heard the closet’s door opening. The colt remained at her side a whole day without sleeping or eating or drinking or going to the restroom and without worrying about his parents grounding him if he didn’t return home. He could also see her in the dark.

Twilight had known that something was wrong, but… A GHOST?!

Goldie gave a mock bow. “I am Golden Crown. I died over 300 years ago.”

Twilight was left speechless.

Goldie snorted. “A necromancer scared of a ghost. I think that that’s a first.”

Twilight remained silent for a few more seconds. Then, she closed her eyes and shook her head. He may be a ghost, he was still the colt who spent a whole day at her side so she wouldn’t be alone.

She then glared at Goldie and hit him on the leg. “Jerk!”

“Wha-?! Ow! Hey! How did you hit me? You couldn’t touch me one minute ago!”

“I… don’t… know… I… real… ly… want… ed… to… punch… you.”

“Alright. Note to self: don’t anger the necromancer who can punch you. Wow. It feels weird to feel pain again.”

“Lich.”

“Uh?”

“I’m… a… lich.”

“Really? I didn’t think liches existed! I think this makes you even cooler!”

Twilight looked at him in disbelief. “Real… ly? But… I’m… a… mons… ter.”

“Maybe, but you don’t look like you want to conquer Equestria. If you are a monster, then you are the nicest monster ever.”

Twilight couldn’t believe what she heard. For several seconds, she looked at Goldie as she processed how “nice” and “monster” could work in the same sentence. Then, she hugged him.

“Thank… you!”

Goldie was surprised by the hug. He… hadn’t been hugged in a while. It felt so nice…

Twilight released him. “So… Uh… How… did… you… find… me? You… said… you… were… drawn… to… me.”

Goldie shook his head as he recovered from the hug.

“I saw you leave the hospital. I was going there to talk to the ghosts there and see if I could convince some to pass on.”

“There… are… ghosts… in… the… hos… pit… tal?”

“Of course. Many ponies die in the hospital. Without surprise, a few of them remain behind for various reasons. There are also some ghosts in the cemetery, a few others in the castle, and more here and there in Canterlot, generally where accidents happened. I try to help them pass on.”

“Wow…”

“I know, right? Ghosts are actually everywhere. The living just can’t see us unless we want it, and it asks a lot of energy to manifest. I guess that now that you are dead, you can see us. Anyway, I was going to the hospital when I saw you and I immediately felt drawn to you, so I followed you. I saw you enter this house, but it was difficult to find you after that. You really found a good hiding place with that closet.”

“Thank… you. Why… are… you… drawn… to… me?”

“No idea. It must be a necromancer thing. Or a lich thing.”

Twilight became thoughtful after that, wondering about her new powers. Then, she thought about something, gasped, and pointed a hoof at Goldie.

“You… are… the… Laugh… ing… Colt!”

“What?”

“There… is… this… ur… ban… le… gend. Ma… ny… mys… te… ri… ous… things… hap… pen… in… Can… ter… lot, and… a… colt… is… of… ten… heard… laugh… ing.”

“Oh yeah, that’s me and my pranks I told you about,” Goldie said proudly. “I guess I’m quite the celebrity.”

Twilight looked at Goldie in awe.

Eventually, Goldie asked, “So, now that you can move more or less well, what will you do?”

Twilight looked sadly aside. “I’m… lea… ving… Can… ter… lot…”

Chapter 4

Goldie stared at Twilight questioningly. “Why do you want to leave Canterlot?”

Twilight gave him a flat look. “I’m… a… lich… How… do… you… think… po… nies… will… re… act?”

Goldie winced. “Point. But I’m sure that Princess Celestia could help!”

Twilight hesitated. “She… will… kill… me.”

Goldie rubbed the back of his head. “Fair, I guess. With you being a lich, she may see you as a threat. But… maybe she won’t jump to conclusions?”

“I… don’t… know… A… doc… tor… said… she… will… put… me… to… rest.”

“Weeeell… It is possible that her first reaction upon seeing you will be to try to ‘free you from this cursed existence’. But maybe if you tell her no, she will listen? I mean, you don’t mind being a lich, right?”

Twilight looked down sadly. “I… would… ra… ther… be… a… live.”

“But you don’t want to be dead dead.”

“Yeah.”

“Then, if you tell her that, she won’t do anything to you. Maybe.”

Twilight remained silent, prompting Goldie to sigh.

“Okay. All these “maybes” aren’t helping. It’s just… Princess Celestia is so benevolent that she could accept you despite being a lich. But, for Harmony, she may think that an undead doesn’t have its place among ponies, and with you being a lich, a creature generally seen as a villain, it doesn’t help. It’s really hard to say how she would react to you. I guess it’s up to you to decide if you want to take the risk. It’s just… If you decide to leave Canterlot, then you will be all alone, and that’s sad. But if you take the risk… Well, what about your family?”

“I… don’t… know.”

“You have no idea how they will react to you either, uh?”

Twilight nodded.

“Then… Do you intend to leave Canterlot tonight?”

“No. I… will… wait… to… be… less… stiff… So… to… mo… rrow… night.”

“Then, how about I go have a look? Where do you live?”

Twilight gave Goldie a hopeful look. “14 Clover Street.”

“Alright, I know where it is. Well then, once morning comes, I’ll go there, then I’ll spy on Princess Celestia in the afternoon once court is over.”

“You… don’t… mind?”

“Not at all! It’s only normal for a hero to help, Princess.”

If Twilight could blush, she would. “I’m… not… a… prin… cess.”

Goldie gave a small grin. “You’re my princess.”

The filly looked away, not saying anything to that, which made Goldie laugh.

They spent the rest of the night in the house, Twilight telling more to Goldie about her life, especially her family so the colt would know who to look for.

Once morning came, Goldie left the house, passing through the wall, and floated in the direction of Clover Street.

On the way, he spotted something that made him stop. There, on a wall, was a photograph of Twilight Sparkle with written under it: “Have you seen this filly? If yes, talk to the nearest guard.”

“Uh… So the princess is searching for her.”

Goldie resumed flying toward Twilight’s home. On the way, he saw more photos of the filly, and also spotted some Royal Guards here and there looking into alleys, behind trash cans, and anywhere else a filly could hide.

Eventually, he reached Twilight’s home and passed through the wall.

From what Twilight told him, her father, Night Light, was probably still sleeping. He worked late into the night, observing and studying the night sky.

Her mother, Twilight Velvet, should be awake however, preparing for her job as a librarian.

Twilight also told him about her big brother, Shining Armor, who started as a cadet in the Royal Guard not long ago, so he shouldn’t be present.

However, Goldie found the two parents present and awake. And they looked… not very good. They looked very tired, with dark circles around their eyes. They clearly didn’t get a good night of sleep. Maybe more than one night.

They were just there, sitting on the couch, Twilight Velvet lying against her husband. Tear tracks could also be seen on her fur.

As Goldie observed them, they didn’t move at all. They just remained there.

Then, there was a knock on the door which got a reaction from them. Before they could move from the couch, the door opened, then closed, and into the room entered who Goldie recognized was Shining Armor from Twilight’s description.

He looked even worse than his parents. He clearly hadn’t slept in a while, and his mane needed to be combed.

The parents looked at him hopefully, but then, he shook his head, and Night Light looked down dejectedly with a sigh while Twilight Velvet began to cry.

“Where could she be?” she asked.

Shining Armor got tears in his eyes, not able to answer.

“Go to sleep, son. You need it,” Night Light said.

“I… I can’t…”

“I will take your place.”

Shining Armor stared at his father, then nodded before he exited the room. Goldie heard him climb stairs before closing a door.

Night Light got up from the couch, gently tapping his wife’s hoof before he left the house.

Goldie left the house too, immediately returning to Twilight.

The filly, who was curled up in the closet with the door open, looked at him in surprise.

“You are already back?” she asked. Her speech was better, but still a bit slow.

“I have good news. Your family knows that you are alive. They probably know that you are an undead, and they don’t seem to care. They are searching for you.”

Twilight gasped excitedly. “Really?!” But then, she calmed down. “Do… Do they know that I’m a lich?”

“I… don’t know. But if they don’t care that you are an undead, they may not care that you are a lich.”

Twilight wanted to cry so much right now. She felt so relieved.

“Your dad just began searching for you after your brother went to sleep. However… Princess Celestia is also searching for you. There are photos of you and Royal Guards everywhere. As soon as you get out of this house, you will get spotted.”

Twilight had expected that. The doctors told Princess Celestia about her. That was why she wanted to wait for the night to get out. It meant she won’t be able to go to her father, to her frustration.

“Well, I guess that I should go to the castle now. But the court must have started by now, so I don’t expect to find out anything until its pause at noon or its end.”

“Ok.”

So Goldie left the house again, floating toward the castle. Inside it, he easily found the Throne Room where, as expected, Celestia was holding court.

So, now, it was just a matter of waiting.

It was the first time that he watched court, and frankly, after a few hours, he wondered how Celestia was still sane. The occasional ponies who needed help one way or another weren’t a problem. A guy needed funds to renovate some building in Fillydelphia, ok. The Captain informed that the Royal Guards needed more armors, alright. A stupid dispute needed to be settled, ok, this one was funny.

Then, there were the nobles.

Three fourths of the court was spent listening to the nobles going on and on and on about how and why some law or reform needed to be passed which could be resumed with “this will make me richer.”

Nice to be reminded why Goldie loved to prank these idiots.

Goldie didn’t know how Celestia was doing. She just remained there, smiling and nodding before she calmly and patiently told the noble why this law or reform couldn’t be passed.

In her place, he would rip the nobles a new one.

Finally came the lunch pause, Celestia leaving the Throne Room to eat. Goldie followed her, but sadly, nothing interesting happened. The princess returned to the Throne Room and resumed the circus.

Oh? Here comes Prince Diamond Tooth. Blueblood's father. Goldie’s favorite target. And yes, he had a diamond tooth.

He was strutting with so much pride, his muzzle pointing exactly toward the ceiling, not looking at all where he was going.

Goldie placed a leg in his path and spent some energy making himself tangible but still invisible.

Diamond Tooth tripped and promptly faceplanted.

In front of all the nobles present in the court, without forgetting Princess Celestia herself who had a hoof before her muzzle.

Whatever Diamond Tooth had planned to say, he decided instead to do a strategic retreat, leaving the room with very red cheeks.

Did Goldie hallucinate, or did he see Celestia silently sigh in relief?

No matter, the colt burst into laughter. He wanted to make himself heard, like he often did after his pranks, but with so many ponies present, especially Celestia, he decided against it. Besides, he was still on a spying mission.

Court continued after the incident, then ended, and Celestia left the room to have some time for herself before dinner, Goldie following her.

However, nothing special was to report for the rest of the day. Celestia said nothing about Twilight, even when she talked with Princess Cadance. Probably she waited for a report that the filly was found, and until then, she just continued her day without thinking about it. Or if she was thinking about Twilight, then she didn’t show it. At a moment, she just looked through the window toward the city, as if looking for something, but Goldie couldn’t say if it had anything to do with Twilight or not.

Same when Celestia lowered the sun and raised the moon. She looked over Canterlot for a bit before and after, but it was possible that she was simply looking over her ponies as they were in the process of returning to their homes for the night.

After that, she went to bed, and Goldie decided that it was time to return to Twilight with a very disappointing report.

In the end, they still had no idea if Celestia would harm Twilight or not.

Twilight took her decision. She didn’t want to take the risk of meeting Princess Celestia, so she was leaving Canterlot tonight.

She tried not to think of the pressure within her slowly swelling abdomen.

Goldie told her that many guards were present at Canterlot’s exit, but he reassured her that he knew a secret path.

But before that, Twilight intended to say goodbye.

So, after she was given the green light by Goldie, she opened the same window that she used to enter the house and passed it to exit it, closing it behind her. She then followed Goldie.

Almost right away, a couple of flies began to circle her, to her annoyance. She tried to slap one away, but she missed it.

Twilight went from alley to alley to try to remain hidden as Goldie regularly went ahead and returned with news of whether or not there was a guard. If the answer was yes, they took a detour. If not, then they continued.

After many long minutes, Twilight finally reached her destination: her house.

Goldie entered it first, then came out not long after. “Your parents are sleeping. Your brother isn’t there however. Probably out searching you.”

Nodding, Twilight silently opened the door and entered.

She so wanted to climb the stairs to go hug her parents, but she didn’t want to wake them up. Goldie told her that they had been very tired when he saw them. They needed to sleep.

She was glad, in a way. If they had been awake, she wasn’t sure if she would have been able to leave.

Lighting her horn, she searched inside a drawer and took out a paper before she grabbed a quill and a bottle of ink. She then went to a table and wrote:

Dear mom, dad, and BBBFF

It’s me, Twilight Sparkle, and I’m writing this letter to tell you goodbye. As you read these lines, I will certainly be outside Canterlot, walking toward an unknown future. I made a friend named Golden Crown, or Goldie, and he told me that you didn’t mind me having become an undead. But I haven’t become any undead, I have become a lich. I don’t know if you knew that.

I’m a monster, plain and simple. I have no idea how Princess Celestia would react to me, but I fear that she may kill me. For good. And even if she let me live, ponies would never accept me, and I know that this would lead to all kinds of problems for you. So I’m leaving. Goldie apparently knows a secret path that will lead me out of Canterlot, so I will be able to avoid the guards.

I’m sorry.

I love you.

Your little Twily.

Once she was done, Twilight double checked the letter, making sure that she didn’t make any error, before she placed the quill back in the bottle and left the letter on the table to be found by her parents.

After that, she left the house, closing the door as silently as she could.

She looked at Goldie who was beside her and nodded.

Nodding back, Goldie led her like before, avoiding the guards and any pony who remained up this late for one reason or another.

Goldie led her to the outskirts of Canterlot, toward the mountainside.

When they reached the wall of stone, Twilight looked at Goldie questioningly. “So, what now?”

Goldie rubbed his chin. “Let’s see if I remember what Gramp Iron Sword told me…” Seeing the filly staring at him, he added, “He was an old retired Royal Guard that I often visited when I was alive. He told me lots of nice stories about his time as a guard, and he is the one who made me want to become one. And he told me about this secret path which should be right here. Uh… Try pressing this rock that juts out?” he finished while pointing at what seemed to be a random rock on the wall.

Twilight placed a hoof on the rock and pushed, only to do nothing.

“Drat. Wrong rock. Uh… Try this one?” Wrong. “This one?” Wrong again. “Com on… Which one was it? This one maybe?”

This time, it worked. When Twilight pushed the rock, it sunk into the wall.

The next instant, a big part of the wall opened, revealing a tunnel with magical torches on the walls that lit up.

Goldie pumped his leg. “Yes!”

Twilight looked at the tunnel in awe. “What is it?”

“If Canterlot was ever besieged, this tunnel was made to evacuate. Only the officers of the Royal Guard-and the princess of course-know about it. It traverses the mountain all the way to the other side. Come on, let’s go before somepony sees you.”

Twilight nodded, then walked into the tunnel.

“Try pressing one of the rocks on this side to close it.”

Twilight did so, and after a few tries, she found the right rock, closing the tunnel’s entrance. She then turned around to look at the tunnel, seeing it stretch too far to see the end, with a torch every ten meters. Then, she looked at Goldie.

“I can’t thank you enough, Goldie. You really helped me a lot.”

Goldie grinned. “You’re welcome, Princess.”

“Now, I guess this is goodbye?”

“What? Why would this be goodbye?”

“Well, I’m on my way to leave Canterlot, and you will remain behind to continue to do what you did before.”

“What, and leave you all alone? No way! You are stuck with me, Princess.”

Twilight stared at Goldie in shock. “R-really?”

“Uhuh. It was starting to get boring in Canterlot anyway. It’s about time that I see more of the world.”

He suddenly found himself hugged by the filly. This time, he didn’t let the shock of being hugged paralyze him too long and returned the hug.

“Thank you.”

“It’s only normal.”

Later, a part of the mountain’s wall opened, and out came Twilight Sparkle and Goldie.

After some searching, Twilight pressed the right rock to close the tunnel.

Then, she looked at the vast expense of green that stretched to the horizon.

“So, where do we go?” Goldie asked.

“No idea,” Twilight answered. “I guess we will take a random direction and… see where this leads us.”

“Wouldn’t the Everfree Forest be a good place to go? It would be a perfect home for a lich.”

“That’s true, but I think that Princess Celestia would expect me to go there and send guards to intercept me on the way before we have time to reach it.”

“Right. Well then, choose a direction, and I’m following you.”

Twilight looked from left to right, then chose a random direction and took the first step.

Chapter 5

Night Light woke up with the first rays of light of the sun. He went to sleep as soon as the sun set last night, after he returned home after a full day of searching Canterlot for his lost daughter, leaving his son to take his place for the night.

He looked to his right at his still sleeping wife. The poor mare also needed her sleep. She woke up twice that night from nightmares.

Carefully, not making a sound, Night Light got up from the bed and went down the stairs, going to the kitchen to prepare breakfast for himself and Twilight Velvet. He wasn’t sure when she will wake up, but a nice meal will be ready for her when this happens.

Once he finished eating and did the dishes, he went to the living room, ready to wait for Shining Armor’s return.

That was when he spotted on the table a paper that hadn’t been there last night, with a quill and bottle of ink just beside it. Curious, Night Light went to pick it up, then read the first line written on it, gasped, and read the rest quickly, tears appearing in his eyes.

When he reached the end, he sobbed and rubbed his eyes. “Oh… Twilight…”

He then quickly climbed the stairs to wake up his wife and show the letter to her. Twilight Velvet then quickly ate her breakfast before the two left the room, opening the door just as Shining Armor had been about to open it. They showed the letter to him, then the three ran toward the castle, not minding the dark clouds covering the sky.

To the first guard they saw at the gate, Twilight Velvet said, “We need to see the princess quickly! It’s about…” She whispered. “Twilight Sparkle.”

By now, every guard knew about Twilight Sparkle, the filly-turned-undead, and Celestia made anything about her a priority, so the three were immediately escorted to the princess while a guard went ahead to warn her.

Celestia was in the middle of holding court when a guard told her that Twilight Velvet, Night Light, and Shining Armor wanted to see her, so she put the court on hold and made everypony except the guards leave the room.

As soon as the three entered, Twilight Velvet ran toward Celestia without even bowing, waving the letter in her magic.

“She left Canterlot!”

That was the last thing Celestia had expected and wanted to hear.

“What? How? Allow me.”

“Of course.”

Twilight Velvet let the princess take the letter which she read. While she mentally sighed at the filly thinking that she may kill her, she immediately focused on two pieces of information present in the letter.

A pony named Golden Crown, and a secret path out of Canterlot.

She frowned. “Golden Crown… I know this name… But… It can’t be… Unless…”

“Who is this pony, Your Highness? Can he be trusted with Twilight?” Twilight Velvet asked.

“Golden Crown… He was my nephew…”

“Do you mean he is part of Prince Diamond Tooth’s family?” Shining Armor asked.

“Yes…”

“Wait… “Was”?” Night Light asked.

Celestia nodded. “He was Diamond Tooth’s great granduncle. He died as a colt over 300 years ago.”

The family exchanged looks of astonishment before Night Light asked, “Could this be another Golden Crown?”

“Possibly. I will send ponies to look at the birth certificates to see if anypony born in the last few decades has been named Golden Crown. But… It is possible that your daughter is speaking of my deceased nephew.”

“How?” Twilight Velvet asked.

“As a necromancer, Twilight Sparkle would have gotten the ability to see ghosts.”

It dawned on the ponies what she meant.

“She could have talked to Golden Crown’s ghost if he didn’t pass on,” Night Light said.

Celestia nodded. “And I suspected for a while that he didn’t pass on. Not long after his death, I started to get reports of mysterious incidents happening everywhere in Canterlot, especially to the nobles, followed by the laugh of a colt coming from nowhere. I think that it is now known as an urban legend in the city.”

“The Laughing Colt,” Shining Armor said before he shook his head. “I didn’t believe it. Just a scary story, I thought. I guess I was wrong.”

“If this is really my nephew that Twilight Sparkle befriended, then I don’t think that you have to worry. He is a good colt. He wanted to go against his parents’ wishes and become a Royal Guard. More than that, he wanted to become a hero.” Thinking back to the colt, she let out a small giggle. “He was always running around with a wooden sword, and he often remained at my side to guard me. He was always ready to help somepony in need.” Then, she got sad. “He left us far too early…” She shook her head to think back to the present. “Seeing that Twilight Sparkle is alone, he will certainly remain at her side and do his best to protect her.”

Twilight Velvet breathed in relief. “So it seems that Twilight is in good hooves, at least. What about this secret path she is talking about?”

“There is only one secret path leading out of Canterlot that I can think of,” Celestia said before she got up from the throne, giving the letter back to Twilight Velvet. “It is a secret evacuation tunnel inside the mountain. Come, I will lead us to it.”

And so, with an escort, they left the castle under the rain and, before long, they were before the wall of the mountain.

“This is a secret that I want all of you to keep to yourselves, for security reasons,” Celestia then said before she pressed a rock, opening the wall and revealing the tunnel. “Only the officers of the Royal Guard normally know about it.”

“Then how could Golden Crown know about it?” Shining Armor asked.

Celestia sighed. “He often visited a retired Captain known as Iron Sword. He probably learned it from him. That old stallion loved to tell stories of his time as a guard, and he must have thought that it wouldn’t hurt. Golden Crown was good at keeping secrets.”

“And this tunnel leads to the other side of the mountain?” Night Light asked.

“Indeed,” Celestia answered before she pressed the rock again, closing the tunnel. Then, she teleported everypony to the other side of the mountain. “It leads right here. From here…” She looked around. “She could have gone anywhere. But she probably went to a place where nopony would be present, and the closest I can think of would be the Everfree Forest. I will try to intercept her.”

Shining Armor looked down at the ground, then snorted. “Too bad the rain removed any trace she may have left that we could have followed. Talk about bad timing.”

“That is indeed very unfortunate, Cadet Armor,” Celestia said. “Hopefully, she really went to the Everfree Forest. I can’t think of a better place where she could hide.”

Over the next few hours however, Celestia couldn’t find Twilight anywhere between Canterlot and the Everfree Forest, and she doubted that the filly managed to reach the forest in just one night by walking. She had to face the fact, Twilight went against her expectation and chose to go elsewhere than toward the obvious choice.

And so, the question was: where in Equestria could she be?”

This made her very frustrated. She will have to send words to the guards everywhere in the kingdom. The problem was that a photograph wouldn’t help for long, but a walking skeleton shouldn’t be hard to spot if she showed herself.

If she showed herself.

And nothing said that she would remain in Equestria.

She may really have lost for good the filly who could have become Luna’s savior.

She still hoped that she would be found, but it was fleeting.

She wanted to cry.

Twilight Sparkle continued to walk toward an unknown destination, surrounded by flies, much to her growing frustration. Not helping at all was her vision slowly obscuring because of corneal opacity. Her belly was still swelling, and she began to release gas in embarrassing ways.

But despite all that, there was one good thing about being an undead: infinite stamina. Despite walking all night, she wasn’t tired at all, and her legs didn’t hurt. And yet, she wasn’t considered the sportive type. Like, at all.

Goldie remained at her side, like he said he would, and while Twilight didn’t have many subjects of discussion in mind, the colt was constantly talking about this or that. Being over 300 years old, he had a lot to talk about, without revealing anything about his life, like who had been his parents. Twilight thought that he was a noble, with a name like Golden Crown, but she couldn’t be certain. It wasn’t impossible for ponies who weren’t nobles to give their foals fancy names. And he didn’t act like a noble at all.

As noon passed, they spotted a village in the distance, to the left.

“Do we go there?”

Twilight shook her head. “Thanks to my fur hiding the marks and discoloration caused by the various stages of death and putrefaction, I still look mostly alive, but I must be smelling pretty bad by now, and I don’t want ponies thinking that I haven’t taken a shower in weeks.”

Goldie shrugged. “Alright.”

With that, they resumed their walk, passing beside the village without getting too close. But then, Goldie stopped as he saw something under a bush, and he went to look.

“What is it, Goldie?” Twilight asked.

Goldie looked under the bush, then back at Twilight. “There’s a dead cat here! Must have felt it was about to die and hid itself here! Sad for whoever owned it. Hey, why not take the occasion to test your necromancy?”

“No way! Besides, I have no idea how to use necromancy!”

“Come on, give it a try. It’s your special talent after all, you should as well accept it, and maybe you will be able to do something even if you haven’t studied necromancy.”

Twilight hesitated, but then sighed and said, “Alright…” before she approached the bush, looking toward the village to make sure that nopony was seeing her. Once she was close and Goldie walked out of the way, she could see the cat slightly poking out of the bush. A black cat with a white belly and chin.

She felt very sad seeing a dead animal. She wasn’t a cat pony, but still…

After some hesitation, she used her magic to pull the cat from under the bush, then sat down to look at it, wondering where to start.

The cat must have died very recently, because it hadn’t reached rigor mortis yet, and there were no flies flying around it, so it wasn’t smelling, meaning that the putrefaction hadn’t started.

After a couple of minutes just thinking and studying the cat, she decided to try something. She lit her horn and willed the cat to become alive again. Then, as if her own magic guided her, she created the spell and fired a beam at the cat.

Almost right away, the cat opened its eyes and got up, sitting in front of Twilight and looking at her with lifeless eyes.

Twilight stared at the cat in awe, not believing that she really brought something back to life. However, she could tell that she didn’t really bring back the cat. Its soul was gone. It was just an empty shell ready to follow her will. She could probably give it more personality with some more studying of her power, but until then, it was nothing more than a mindless zombie.

But it was her zombie.

“You did it!” Goldie shouted excitedly, getting Twilight out of her shock.

“Uh… Get up?” she sorta ordered the cat.

The cat got up.

“Walk to my left.”

The cat walked a few steps to her left.

“Jump.”

The cat jumped.

“Do a meow.”

“Meow.”

After that, Twilight wasn’t sure what to do. She now had a zombie cat, what next?

“Uh… From now on, you are Felix.”

The cat didn’t react to receiving a name.

“Well… then… Felix… Let’s go. Follow me.”

And she began to walk, the cat following her.

Immediately, Goldie was at her side. “So, how does it feel to have your first minion?”

“I… have no idea.”

“Well, I think that it is very exciting! Ok, I admit that there is not much you can do with a cat, but it’s still a huge first step! Now, imagine what you could do if you could get your hooves on other animals. Like… a dog! You could use its powerful sense of smell! Or… a giraffe! To reach really high stuff!”

“Where would I find a giraffe?”

“No idea. But it would be really cool if you had one.”

“Wouldn’t it be simpler to get a bird and order it to fly to grab whatever could be so high?”

Goldie huffed. “It would be less cool. But… I guess that it would be easier to find. Well then, let’s search for a bird! How about a crow? Or a parrot, to make it talk! Or I guess you would be more the owl type.”

“I can’t believe you are talking about what kind of zombie bird I would like as if you asked what kind of apple I would like at the market,” Twilight said with a flat look before she sighed. “I guess that’s my life now. Or… unlife. And to answer you, I will settle with whatever dead bird we encounter first, if we find one.”

“It will be easier to find one if we search the den of a predator, like a fox.”

“I will think about it if we see a fox.”

“Or… You could order Felix to attack a bird.”

“What?!”

“As a cat, it shouldn’t be a problem for it.”

“I will not kill a bird! I don’t want to kill anything!”

“Right, sorry. It’s just that killing things is your main way to get corpses to animate. It’s by pure luck that we found this dead cat.”

“I would rather take the long way and search for corpses rather than make corpses.”

“Ok. I guess that you won’t have an undead army anytime soon.”

“Why would I want an undead army?”

“Every necromancer has an undead army, just for the heck of it. You could use one to build your own tower.”

“I… guess that a tower would be nice. Many great mages in history have huge towers. I wouldn’t mind one of my own. So… I guess that an undead army would be alright. But I will not kill. And I will avoid reanimating ponies. I will remain respectful of the dead.”

“Unless their ghosts authorize you to use their body?”

“Unless that, yes. But just the idea of reanimating a pony creeps me out.”

“Meh. You just reanimated a cat. It’s just as creepy, and you didn’t mind.”

“I don’t know, I guess that being a pony, touching other pony corpses doesn't feel right.”

“Fair. Well then, let’s search for a fox den for your zombie bird.”

“Preferably one with no fox pups. I would rather avoid getting a mother angry.”

Chapter 6

In the following days, Twilight and Goldie continued to advance, Twilight having to transport Felix because it entered the rigor mortis stage. The ghost managed to find a fox den which, thankfully, was empty of pups, so he guided the filly to it. Goldie then verified that the fox wasn’t there before she entered it.

Inside, as they hoped, they found the remains of various small animals. Impossible however to identify what these animals were because the bones were scattered everywhere. Twilight was able to identify at least one bird thanks to a bird skull she managed to spot in the mess. There was no doubt that several of these bones also belonged to various rodents, and maybe some rabbits.

They came here for a bird but… having a few more animals could be useful. So she lit her horn and did her thing. Thankfully, she didn’t have to reconstitute the skeletons. After a test, she found out that touching just one bone with her spell caused all the bones belonging to the same skeleton to assemble and reform it.

By the time she was done, she left the den followed by two birds, five rodents, three rabbits, and even a frog. And yes, the birds could somehow fly. She couldn’t tell however what kind of birds and rodents they were. She didn’t have enough knowledge about animal skeletons to identify them.

“It would be nice if you could get your hooves on a big animal, like a bear,” Goldie said.

“I would need to be in a forest for that.”

After that, they continued on their way. A few hours later, Twilight and her undead had to hide in a bush as pegasi were flying above, pushing clouds. She had to wait for hours as they did their job and covered the sky. Eventually, they were done, and the pegasi went away as it started to rain.

While the pegasi worked, having nothing to do, Twilight couldn’t stop herself from thinking about her parents, and suddenly, she had to hug Goldie who did his best to reconfort her.

Twilight welcomed the rain. It made the flies go away. It was a bit late however as she could tell that there were maggots now inside her. Thinking about that disgusted her, but there was nothing she could do about it.

A few hours later, when the rain stopped, she had to hide again as the pegasi returned to get rid of the clouds.

On her seventh day since her death, after passing a couple more villages and a town, they entered a forest. Felix could move again, so it joined her skeleton escort. Wanting to find big animals for Twilight, Goldie explored around. Finding dead animals was harder than it sounded however.

One day after entering the forest however, in the middle of the night, Twilight stopped and sat down. Goldie looked at her questioningly.

“Why did you stop?”

“It’s getting hard to see where I am going. One minute…”

The lich lit her horn, then pulled her eyes out of their sockets, making Goldie step back in disgust.

“Eww. You could have warned.”

“Sorry.”

At least, it worked. She could see again. Even better, as she looked around at the forest, she discovered that she now had night vision. She looked back at her eyes, frowned in disgust, and tossed them into a bush with a “Goodbye, eyes.”

She then looked at Goldie. “What do I look like, now?”

“Scary and disturbing. Also, you have little purple flames inside your eye sockets.”

“Uh. Ok.”

“You don’t seem perturbed that you are now eyeless.”

“I have accepted that I will be nothing more than a skeleton. I was prepared to lose my eyes, especially with my vision disappearing.”

“That’s still sad, you really had nice eyes.”

“Uuh… Thank you.”

It wasn’t long after that, as the sun rose, that Goldie found what he searched: the remains of a wolf.

“This is not a bear, but a wolf is still cool.”

“It should be able to defend me if I’m attacked,” Twilight said before she reanimated the skeleton.

Once the wolf was up, she jumped on its spine and sat on it, her back legs dangling between its ribs.

“Go on, Woofy!”

Goldie snorted. “Woofy? Really?”

Twilight pouted. “Hey, come on, it’s a good name.”

Goldie laughed. “Alright, I admit, it’s cute.”

With the wolf now in the team, the group advanced through the forest. By afternoon, they reached the end of it, finding a city not far ahead. They could also see the ocean beyond it.

“Oh, I guess I chose the wrong direction.”

“There are not many good directions. East and West are mostly oceans, North is frozen, and South is a desert. And considering that we went to the opposite side from Canterlot, we had more chances of reaching the Celestial Sea.”

“Which city do you think it is?”

“Let me give it a look.”

Goldie then floated away. A few minutes, he returned with the answer: “It’s Baltimare.”

“Baltimare?” Twilight repeated before she tried to remember the map of Equestria.

“There are swamps south of here, if you want to go through such a place. It would allow us to go around the desert and the Badlands, and go to whatever there is beyond.”

It would mean getting outside of Equestria, as Twilight wished, but she had to admit that she was scared of the unknown. She never saw a map of what was outside of Equestria. She knew the name of some countries, but not where they were.

But remaining in Equestria meant that Princess Celestia could find her.

So Twilight nodded. “Yes, we will go through the swamps. But first,” She looked toward Baltimare. “I need a cloak. Let’s see if I can find one in Baltimare.” She looked at her group of undead. “Explore this city and find me a cloak. Try not to be seen. Prince, you remain here, you won’t be very useful searching a city. Woofy too, you are too big to not be seen.”

At that, all of the animals except the frog and the wolf moved toward Baltimare. And now, it was just a matter of waiting.

“You know, it would have been easier if you had told them to bring material to make one yourself. I have no idea where they could find one. Especially one sized for a filly,” Goldie pointed out, making Twilight facehoof. “Try to see if you can give an order from a distance. Like, through the link you have with them, or some kind of telepathy.”

“Ok.”

Twilight closed her ‘eyes’ and focused into her mind. She could see her magic, like all unicorns, and from it, she could see little purple strings disappearing into the darkness. She guessed that they were her links to her undead, so she focused on them, then on a random one particularly. As soon as she ‘touched’ it, she could tell that this one led to one of her rodents. She then followed it.

Suddenly, she could see through eyes that weren’t her own. She could see that the rondent they belonged to was moving toward the outskirts of Baltimare.

Do you hear me? Nod if you can.

The animal nodded.

Alright, change of plan. Bring me material to make a cloak. So, soft fabric, a button, scissors, knitting needles, and thread. Repeat what I said to the others.

Immediately, the rodent approached Felix, and while Twilight questioned if the cat would be able to understand squeaks, the rodent talked, to her surprise, perfectly imitating her voice and repeating what she said.

Uh. Well, the skeletons didn’t have vocal cords anymore, so she guessed that their voice was now magical, meaning that they weren’t limited anymore to whatever sounds they made when they were alive. And so, they could talk, which was great, and a bit freaky, especially when it imitated her voice so well.

Wait, did it mean that once she loses her vocal cords, she will be able to imitate the voices of others? It could be useful.

Obviously, the rodent couldn’t repeat what she said to the birds which had already reached the city and were now hiding in the clouds from the pegasi, so she ‘moved’ from the rodent to one of the birds and repeated what she said, and the bird repeated what she said to the other.

She then ‘moved’ from undead to undead to see what they were doing, but they all encountered the same problem: they couldn’t search the city correctly because there were too many ponies to move without being seen.

Now that she thought about it, she should have waited the night.

So, no choice but to wait.

Meanwhile, she focused on Woofy, wanting to test something. ‘Entering’ its body, she discovered that, with some more focus on her link to it, she could take control of its body as if it was her own. She jumped, she growled, she walked around, and there was no problem. However, as she looked at her own body through the eyes of the wolf, she could see that it was totally immobile, defenseless, with no idea of what was going on around it.

Note to self: enter her minions’ bodies only when she was sure that it was safe.

Thankfully, Goldie was here to guard her body, and she doubted that any predator would want a piece of her in her state by now.

She resumed looking through the eyes of the animals sent to Baltimare, but nothing changed. They moved a bit from one place to another when they had the occasion, but they were still pretty much stuck.

So she waited for night to fall. During the wait, she tested to see if she could be in more than one body at once, but it failed.

As she hoped, there were less ponies in the streets once the sun set, so her animals were able to move with more freedom, even if they had to remain careful. Eventually, they found a seamstress shop, and Felix was able to jump to the handle to open the door, allowing the animals to enter.

Then, she thought of something and talked to them one by one. Can you try to make the cloak by yourselves with the material here? It would be nice not having to take anything.

It turned out, the undead could. They searched around and found what was needed, a roll of fabric, scissors, needles, and so on. And then, they began to work, Twilight guiding them just in case.

The birds unrolled the fabric until Twilight estimated that it was enough, and a rodent used its own teeth to cut it. They then cut some more fabric for the hood, Twilight not sure how much was needed for it.

They sewed, they made the closure with a button, they cut, and in less than an hour, a hooded cloak was made. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to do its job, and as long as nothing happened, it should be able to last a while.

The birds took the cloak in their claws, ready to fly out of the store with it, when suddenly, there was light, and somepony said, “Who’s here?”

The animals all looked in the same direction: toward one of the exits of the room where a mare was now present, holding a candle, and shaking. Then, she saw the animals, and she screamed.

Run! Twilight ordered. Drop everything except the cloak, and run!

The rabbit she was talking to immediately obeyed her. The others followed its example, and they all ran or flew out of the store. They then escaped the city, being seen by a few more ponies who all screamed and ran away. A guard saw them and ran after them, so Twilight told them to scatter. The guard ended up chasing one of the rodents which escaped him by climbing on the rooftops.

Eventually, one by one, the animals reached Twilight. The birds were the first to arrive with the cloak.

“Thank you,” she said as she took the cloak and inspected it. It was black, as she had wanted.

“You know it’s useless to thank them, right? They are mindless minions who just follow what you order,” Goldie said.

“Right…”

She put on the cloak. It went all the way to the ground, hiding even her hooves. Good. She then put on the hood.

“How do I look?”

“Not bad. Once you turn into a skeleton, you will look like the Reaper.”

She wasn’t sure what to think of that.

When all the animals were present, she immediately returned on Woofy’s back and made him move south, not wanting to remain here in case the guards searched around Baltimare for the undead animals and their origin. No doubt they will report that to Princess Celestia, and she will immediately come to investigate.

“You know, I advise you to leave an animal behind to keep an eye on what is going on in Equestria.”

That wasn’t a bad idea, so she ordered one of her rodents, that she named Mickey, to go to Canterlot.

She will have to find a way to give more independence to it, to see if it could alert her if something interesting happened, and so it could decide by itself where to go and what to do.

With that done, she moved toward the swamp.

Chapter 7

Celestia received the report: undead creatures were spotted in Baltimare.

Right away, she was certain that it was Twilight Sparkle. So the filly already discovered how to reanimate corpses, without receiving any teaching in necromancy. Very impressive. As expected from somepony with such a Cutie Mark.

However, her position was very bad news. Baltimare was near the border of Equestria, and if the filly wanted to leave the kingdom, then she just had to go south, and Celestia would lose her trace into the Hayseed Swamp and the jungle beyond. From there, she could end up anywhere in the lands in the south; the jungle, the forest around the Arimaspi Territory (she doubted that Twilight would enter said territory however, it would be too dangerous even for her), the Bone Dry Desert, the Sea of Clouds, all the way to the coast near Mount Aris.

Worst case scenario, she could even take a ship or an airship to who knew where beyond the oceans.

She hoped she wouldn’t go into the Bone Dry Desert. It was a lawless region where ponies were treated as slaves. And an undead pony? It would be a trophee, an object of collection. Every century or so, Celestia personally went there to free any pony slave she could find, not without causing some destruction and sending a few people to the hospital (or whatever counted as a hospital there), but they never learned their lesson.

Because of that, she hesitated to send guards there.

In the end, she decided to hope that Twilight Sparkle will eventually see that living there wasn’t worth it and will return to Equestria. And just in case the filly manages to board a ship or an airship, she will send words to rulers with whom she had a good relationship to keep an eye for her if she appears in their nations.

And if Twilight Sparkle ends up a slave… Well, next year, it will be exactly one century since the last time she went to the Bone Dry Desert. It shouldn’t be hard to get words about an undead filly.

It was official, Twilight hated swamps. The mud stuck to her hooves, it wasn’t rare that she was up to her knees and even her forearms in it, it was very humid, and worst of all, the BUGS.

She had nothing to fear from carnivores. She wasn’t fresh enough for them. She walked beside crocodiles (or were they alligators?) without fear. But the bugs still considered her as a walking buffet and incubator, and there were LOTS of bugs in the swamp.

It didn’t help that she entered the black putrefaction stage. She couldn’t smell to confirm it, so she had Goldie look at her skin, and he eventually confirmed the black discoloration appearing. So, no doubt that by now, she was smelling worse than a skunk, which attracted all the bugs in a very large radius.

No doubt, those bugs will turn her into a skeleton before decomposition could do its job.

She especially hated when bugs entered her eye sockets.

In answer, she submerged herself into the swamp water as much as possible to get rid of them, even if temporarily, without fear of the bite-acudas present. Since she didn’t breathe anymore, she could remain in it as much as she wanted, giving her some peace.

Because of all that, progression through the swamp was very slow. It took her days to traverse it.

However, there was a good thing about swamps: there were many animals, and so, many bones. Goldie found quite a number of them, often scattered by scavengers. One spell from Twilight was enough to assemble them if they weren’t too far apart. Thanks to that, she ended with many more animals joining her growing little army, including a couple of crocodiles (or alligators), a hippopotamus, a fox, and much to Goldie’s joy, a bear. But she mostly got small animals, like beavers, birds, frogs or toads (including a bufogren), squirrels, and rodents. She also found a turtle but she left it dead. It would be too slow to follow her.

Eventually, the swamp left place to a jungle. By then, Twilight had a few holes in her body made by the insects. Thanks to that, her abdomen wasn’t swollen anymore. However, as she traversed the jungle and days passed, she was starting to lose hair in great quantity, exposing her putrefied skin.

They found more dead animals in the jungle, including a monkey, some large feline she couldn’t identify (it would be cool if it was a lion, but a tiger, panther, or jaguar wouldn’t be bad either), another wolf, an anaconda, and even an elephant.

After a couple of days, she got the idea of sending her animals to find skeletons and guide her to them, so her army grew bigger even faster. She even managed to find an antelope partially devoured but still very recently dead. When it reached rigor mortis, she had the unknown feline (that she named Tabby) transport it.

She had no idea of what she will do with all these dead animals, but it was nice to have them.

They found a hydra, but it was still very much alive so they left it alone. But now, Goldie dreamed of having a skeleton hydra.

By the time she reached the end of the jungle, she grew quite the army. By now, she was pretty much naked, and her ribs and part of her skull around her right eye socket were exposed because of the insects devouring her.

She was entering her fourth week since her death.

Also, her cloak was caked with mud and now had several tears caused by the vegetation. It needed repair.

Then she found herself in a desert. Sand everywhere as far as the eye can see. Just great.

Goldie looked back at the jungle. “I think that we should return to the jungle.”

“Why?”

Twilight’s voice now had an echoey effect, a result of the fact that it was now of magical origin because her vocal cords were gone.

“It would be a great place to settle for you. Nopony would bother you there, and it would give you a constant supply of fresh corpses to reanimate. Also, there are lots of resources to build something like a tower; wood is everywhere, and it shouldn’t be hard to find stone.”

“Mmh… That’s true. But first!” She looked back at the desert. “Let’s see if we can find some dead animals to help, especially big ones. There are always skeletons in deserts. And let’s see if there is a settlement. Some tools, like axes and pickaxes, would be very useful for starting.”

Goldie raised an eyebrow. “You intend to show yourself?”

“Of course not. I may be outside of Equestria, but the locals may still react badly to a lich. No, I will send some small animals to search, like I did in Baltimare. Preferably during the night this time.”

“You don’t need axes, you already have beavers. And the elephant could uproot whole trees.”

Twilight chuckled. “Right, of course.”

After that, they went into the desert, followed by all the animals. And as expected, they found skeletons, completely dried out by the desert.

For a few days, this continued, exploring the desert and finding skeletons to reanimate, while Twilight herself looked more and more like a skeleton with some skin.

Then, they heard a vulture, and looking up, they saw… a vulture skeleton flying in circles above them.

Goldie frowned. “This isn’t one of yours, right?”

“Uh… I’m not sure. Wait a moment.”

She looked at her links with the vultures she found in her journey. Along with all her birds, she sent them to explore the desert and find skeletons. And none of her vultures corresponded to the one flying above them.

She gasped. “Yes, it isn’t mine! It belongs to another necromancer! There is another necromancer in this desert!”

After a few more seconds of flying in circles, the vulture descended toward Twilight, landing in front of her. It stared at her, then said in a deep, gravely voice, “Follow me.” Then, it flew away.

Twilight and Goldie exchanged a look, and the ghost asked, “Do we follow it?”

“A necromancer could teach me what I need about being one. Let’s go.”

“Alright.”

And so, they followed the vulture. For a whole day, they followed it, always going in the same direction. Twilight called back her birds, just in case.

In the distance, they could see a town at the end of a path toward what seemed to be the end of the desert. Beyond was what could only be called a sea of clouds.

The town itself was very vertically built, on large pillars of stone. There were buildings built on wooden platforms along said pillars, vertical houses, and even houses on other houses with walkways. There were also chimneys spewing black smoke, and docks with airships.

Twilight was often said to not judge a book by its cover, but this town didn’t look very good.

Thankfully, she didn’t have to enter it. The vulture descended and landed on the shoulder of someone standing in the path to it.

Twilight recognized a minotaur, very old and lanky, with grayed black fur and gray hair and also a gray beard. He was also wearing a black cloak with a hood, and he was holding a scepter with an amethyst at the top that he was using as a stick to remain standing. As Twilight approached him, she could see that his eyes were clouded. He was blind.

Yet, he could clearly see her. No doubt he was using the vulture to look at her through its eyes. And he seemed to look right at her soul.

Once she got close enough, he talked.

“So, a lich. I don’t think that this world has seen one of your kind in centuries.”

Twilight wanted to gulp. “Uh… Hello. Nice to meet you. I’m Twilight Sparkle.”

“Death Speaker,” the minotaur replied simply. “Surprisingly young for a lich. One usually doesn’t become one until after decades of studying necromancy. You don’t seem to have your phylactery on you. Have you hidden it somewhere? Somewhere good, I hope for you.”

“I… I am the phylactery.”

Death Speaker raised an eyebrow. “Interesting… And very naive of you to tell me that. I could have been an enemy, and now, all I would have to do is crush your skull to eliminate you.”

Again, Twilight wanted to gulp.

“Hey, come on, give her a break, she is just a filly. Last month, she was still sleeping hugging her doll,” Goldie interjected.

“Hey! Don’t say that to strangers!” Twilight shouted, embarrassed.

For the first time, Death Speaker smiled, which looked more like a smirk. “I see. My apologies. I assumed that, by becoming a lich, she would have the corresponding mental. As I said, it usually takes decades to become one. For a filly to become one, I thought that she would be very mature, and smart.”

“I’m smart!” Twilight shouted before she grumbled. “I didn’t become a lich the usual way.”

Death Speaker raised an eyebrow. “Oh? How did you become a lich, then?”

“I’m not sure. I was taking the entrance exam for Princess Celestia’s School For Gifted Unicorns when I got a magic surge. The next thing I knew, I woke up in the mortuary.”

The minotaur actually looked impressed at that. “You turned yourself into a lich… by accident?”

“It seems so. Even got my Cutie Mark on the same occasion.”

“You never studied necromancy?”

“Never.”

“Then, what about the undead following you? How did you know how to animate them?”

“I don’t know, it just came naturally.”

Death Speaker rubbed his chin after that. “Interesting.” Then, he waved at her to follow him. “Come. Let’s go to my house. No need to remain standing here. Remain close to me. Leave your undead in the desert, only bring a couple of them to serve as your guards. Not your elephant. Your ghost minion can come too.”

“Hey! I’m her friend! Not her minion!” Goldie yelled. “Also, my name is Goldie!”

Meanwhile, Twilight said, “Uh… Okay.” She then quickly turned to look at her undead. “Woofy, Tabby, come with me. The others, scatter in the desert and play dead.”

The undead all followed her order, leaving behind the canine and the feline. Seeing that she was ready, Death Speaker began to walk toward the town, and the foals followed him, Twilight remaining close to him as he said.

Twilight didn’t feel reassured when she entered the town. There were all manner of creatures that she didn’t know doing suspicious activities, and they didn’t look as friendly as ponies usually were. Many eyed her… hungrily.

After a few streets, one that looked like a bipedal aquatic creature even stopped them and asked to Death Speaker, “Ooh! Can I have the little one? Whatever your price is, I can pay.”

In return, the minotaur glared at him. The creature raised his hands in surrender.

“Ok, ok! I was just asking!”

Then he walked away.

Every now and then, other creatures asked something similar only to be silenced by the same glare.

One time, however, glaring wasn’t enough. The creature, some kind of bipedal pig, looked confident before he snapped his fingers. Suddenly, Death Speaker and Twilight found themselves surrounded.

“Let’s try another time. How many for the little undead equine? Come on, I’m asking nicely,” the pig said.

Death Speaker’s glare intensified. “And here is my nice answer.”

And suddenly, he smacked the pig with his scepter so hard that he knocked him out right away.

The others looked surprised, but they quickly recovered and jumped on the minotaur. The amethyst on the scepter then glowed, and a magical shield appeared around Death Speaker and Twilight, the creatures all crashing into it.

Death Speaker removed the shield, then his vulture flew up before he began to smack the scepter around as if he was wielding a staff. One of the creatures tried to get him from behind, but the vulture arrived and clawed him.

Twilight stared in awe as Death Speaker was single handedly defeating a large group of thugs.

“Snap out of it! We should help!” Goldie shouted at her.

Twilight shook her head, then looked at Woofy and Tabby. “Attack the guys attacking us! Uh… Please, avoid killing them. And don’t attack them if they are unconscious.”

The two skeletons immediately jumped on their nearest targets, making Twilight wince.

Goldie also participated by lowering the hat of one of the attackers to cover his eyes as he had been about to attack, blinding him long enough to be knocked out by Death Speaker’s scepter.

In a few minutes, it was over. Fourteen unconscious creatures now surrounded the group. Twilight looked at the ones that had been attacked by her skeletons, saw their state, and winced again.

“Not bad,” Death Speaker said to the filly while his vulture returned on his shoulder. “Now, let’s go.”

Looking away from her victims, Twilight nodded, then walked after the minotaur.

Chapter 8

Climbing the town a bit, they arrived at a house larger than the others, almost like a small manor.

Death Speaker gave a small smile as he saw Twilight look at the large house.

“Selling undead pays well. As you saw, the inhabitants of Klugetown are quite interested to get one. Especially ones as rare as you. This is why I send my vulture to fly over the desert, to search for rare corpses to reanimate and sell.” He chuckled. “Of course, as you can see, I’m getting quite old, and it’s only a matter of years before I die. Then, all my undead will die with me, and the people I sold them to will feel stupid for having wasted so much money on something they only kept for a few years.”

Beside Twilight, Goldie laughed. “Ah! And meanwhile, you live a good life with their money! In their teeth!”

Twilight wasn’t sure if it was nice or not, but it still was a bit funny.

They reached the front door, which Death Speaker opened. “Come. Leave your guards outside.”

“Okay.” She looked at Woofy and Tabby. “Guard the door. Howl and roar if there is anything.”

As the wolf and the feline placed themselves at both sides of the door, Twilight and Goldie followed the old minotaur into the house.

Only for Twilight to be sprayed by a perfume.

“Hey!”

“Sorry, but I don’t want your odor to soak up my house. Anyway, welcome to my house. I would propose something to you, but I don’t think that you have the stomach for anything I would give you.”

Twilight fully entered the house, entering a room that was mostly empty except for a ram skull above the entrance door, a mirror on the wall at the left, a coat rack just beside the mirror in the corner, and a staircase leading up. There was a door at the left, another at the right, and another at the right of the staircase.

Death Speaker closed the door behind her, then what he said registered to her and she groaned.

“That was horrible!”

Goldie, however, burst into laughter.

Then, the skeleton of a unicorn in a maid outfit approached, scaring Twilight.

“I have prepared your favorite coffee, master,” the skeleton said in the voice of a mare.

“Thank you Sunshine. I will be in the living room with my guests.”

“Very well. I will bring the coffee there.”

The skeleton then walked away, Twilight always staring at it.

Once the skeleton was out of sight, leaving through the door at the left, she looked at Death Speaker. “A unicorn?”

“I found her skeleton in the desert three decades ago. Decided to keep it. Having a unicorn maid is very useful.”

“How can you tell this is a mare?”

“The opening of the pelvis is larger to facilitate childbirth.”

“Oh, I see!”

Death Speaker put his cloak on the rack, his vulture having to fly a bit before returning on his now naked shoulder, then led Twilight through the entrance room to the door at the right, entering the living room.

The first thing she spotted upon entering, which made her stop in horror, was a portrait of a familiar blue ram with a red collar with a bell.

Grogar.

Death Speaker saw her expression, then what she looked at, and shrugged.

“Don’t mind him. Every necromancer worth their salt worships him. Say whatever you want about him, he was a genius who reached the pinnacle of necromancy. Most necromancers can only dream of reaching a fraction of his talent, even after studying necromancy during their whole life.”

“It doesn’t make it any less creepy, when you know how the guy is pretty much Evil incarnate,” Goldie said.

“I will not say the contrary.”

Now less sure that it was a good idea to follow the old necromancer who apparently worshiped Grogar, Twilight looked around at the living room.

Beside the portrait of Grogar, it was a normal living room, albeit not very decorated. There was a table in the center with two chairs, a couch, and a shelf full of books beside the couch. A small chandelier above the table was the only source of light.

Death Speaker went to sit on one of the chairs, so Twilight went to sit on the other, removing her cloak, revealing her full state to the minotaur.

And for the first time, Death Speaker could see her Cutie Mark, and he raised an eyebrow.

“Interesting. Not a bad Cutie Mark at all for a necromancer. What have you done to get it?”

“I died.”

“I see…”

Sunshine then arrived with a cup of coffee, giving it to Death Speaker.

“Thank you. Can you take Twilight’s cloak and repair it?”

“You don’t mind?” Twilight asked.

“Not at all.”

“I will repair it right away,” Sunshine said with a small bow before she took the cloak and walked out of the room with it.

“Thank you,” Twilight said.

Death Speaker simply nodded in return before he said, “So, you said that you were taking the entrance exam to Celestia’s School For Gifted Unicorns, right? You must have studied magic a lot then.”

“I read lots of books,” Twilight confirmed before she looked away with a pout. “Not that they were of any help in the exam.”

“Ah, yes, trying to hatch a dragon egg, right?”

“Uhuh.”

“Yes, it is quite the test for young unicorns, and how were you doing at it?”

“Badly. I couldn’t hatch it.”

“Of course. Hatching a dragon egg is not a small feat for a unicorn. Which is why it isn’t the goal of this test.”

“Really?”

“Yes. After all, after some thinking, asking the potential future students to hatch dragon eggs is ridiculous. Nobody would succeed at it. And it’s not like they have a supply of hundreds of dragon eggs for them to hatch, or else, they would be swarming with baby dragons. No, the real test was to see how you would analyse the situation and adapt using what magic you know to try to hatch the egg. What solutions will you come up with? Will you give up after one or two tries? Will you think outside the box? After all, what they want aren’t just powerful unicorns, but determined, powerful unicorns with sharp minds capable of coming up with solutions to any problem, no matter how impossible they seem. They fail? Then they try again, and again, and again, until they succeed or someone else tells them to stop and focus on something else.”

Twilight looked at Death Speaker in awe. “I… I had no idea!” She then sighed. “My only solution had pretty much been to try to brute force it. It never came up that I should try something else. No wonder the teachers looked bored. I would have probably still failed.”

“So it seems that you focus on the obvious solution while forgetting everything else. That’s something you will need to work on if you want to be worthy of your Cutie Mark. Especially now that you are a necromancer. With your army of skeletons, you have many solutions to any problem. And you will discover more potential the more you study necromancy, without forgetting the more normal magic,” Death Speaker said before he smirked. “If you end up fighting someone, firing a magical beam at him will be good, but tripping them first by growing the grass under them will work better. Or why not use some illusion? Or levitate some stone to hit them on the back of the head. Or flash them in the eyes. See what I mean?”

Twilight nodded. “I don’t know if I will ever end up fighting somepony, but I understand what you mean.”

“As a necromancer, and especially as a lich, you WILL end up fighting someone, sooner or later.”

Twilight lowered her head at that.

“Anyway, so you were taking the exam and failing only to get a magical surge which somehow killed you and turned you into a lich.”

Twilight nodded. “And then, I left Canterlot, and Equestria.”

“Which is perfectly understandable, with the reputation of necromancy. And a lich? You would be hunted. Celestia and Luna personally fought quite a number of them through the centuries.”

“Luna?” both Twilight and Goldie, who was on the couch, asked.

“Celestia’s little sister,” Death Speaker answered.

“Princess Celestia has a sister?” Twilight asked in shock.

The minotaur huffed. “Right. Celestia erased her own sister from history books in Equestria. That mare claims to be benevolent, but sometimes, she acts in ways that aren’t any better than the villains she fought.”

“Hey!” Goldie yelled in indignation.

“Nowadays, Luna is better known as the Mare in the Moon, Nightmare Moon,” Death Speaker revealed.

Goldie snorted. “Come on, she is just some boogeymare used to scare the foals during Nightmare Night.”

“Oh, she is very real, and it has been nearly one thousand years since she has been exiled to the Moon. To return to the subject, liches are pretty much Celestia’s enemies, so you did good to escape Equestria. And what do you intend to do, now? You have almost reached the extremity of this continent. Further south in the Sea of Clouds, and then the ocean. I guess that you could take one of the airships to fly to the beyond, but you will have to leave most of your army behind.”

“I was actually thinking of settling in the jungle,” Twilight said.

Death Speaker rubbed his chin. “Yes, it would be a good place for a lich.”

“One of the reasons I came to the desert is to find tools, like axes and pickaxes, to make it easier to start to build something, like, maybe, a tower.”

“I advise against a tower. It would be too visible. A pegasus flying above the jungle could see it. Yes, there are almost no pegasi flying above the jungle, but it can happen. Ponies do come to the desert every now and then. Unless you could cloak the tower in an illusory field to make it invisible, but you are nowhere that advanced yet. No, instead, you should build an underground lair.”

Twilight thought about it. “That’s true… Alright.”

“For the tools, I can help you find some, but unless you found some monkeys, your animals will not be able to use them.”

“I did find a monkey… Just one… And I don’t want to kill animals and to reanimate ponies.”

Death Speaker sighed. “What about other civilized creatures, like griffons and minotaurs?”

“I’m not sure… I don’t feel good thinking about it.”

“You will have to let go of your morals sooner or later. Animals are good, but civilized creatures are the most useful. And waiting for monkeys to drop dead will take too long. There is a pony settlement at the northwest of the desert, a port that also acts as a terminus for the train. I can lead you to the cemetery there to reanimate some corpses out of their tombs.”

Twilight whimpered, making the minotaur sigh again.

“It’s either that or you give up on building a lair. And trust me, you don’t want to remain here in Klugetown.”

She didn’t want to. She really, really didn’t want to. “.........O…Okay…”

“Good. But before that, how about I start to teach you about necromancy? I’m guessing that you want to give some independence to your undead, or to be able to move your body while still looking through the eyes of one of your undead.”

Twilight suddenly got very excited. “Yes! Yes yes yes! Please!”

“Then follow me.”

Leaving behind the now empty cup, Death Speaker got up and led Twilight out of the living room. They climbed the stairs, then took a door at the left.

And they entered a small library.

Twilight gasped.

“Books about magic and books about necromancy, among others,” Death Speaker announced.

Twilight ran around, looking from book to book.

However, she quickly noticed that quite a number of them were signed Grogar, making her gasp again.

“Grogar wrote books?”

“Of course. Thankfully, a fellow necromancer managed to find Grogar’s lair and to get all the books he wrote before the ponies could get their hooves on them and probably burn them. And he did good. Grogar studied life and death like none other in order to better manipulate them and create his monsters. He closely studied the bodies of any creature he could get his hooves on. This is where most of the knowledge modern medicine uses comes from. Yes, he may have done untold atrocities to write these books, but the result is here, and let’s say it, it’s worth it. Any necromancer worth their salt has at least one copy of these books.”

Twilight took a very large book, Fauna Anatomy Vol.1, then opened it, finding very detailed information about the bodies of ponies, griffons, dragons, donkeys, deers, yaks, and many others, and that was just the first volume. Twilight counted dozens of them.

“Thanks to them, you will be able to identify any animal by their skeleton. For example, the feline that followed you, do you know what it is?”

“No.”

“It’s a tiger. And if you search in the third volume, you will discover why. But we aren’t here today for these books.” At that, Death Speaker took a smaller book and showed it to Twilight. “How to Start at Necromancy. I know that you already have a good base with your natural talent, but it’s always good to be sure. Since you can’t sleep, you can spend the night reading it. Tomorrow morning, we will go to the cemetery to get you some pony skeletons so you can start to build your lair.”

Twilight grabbed the book with her telekinesis and immediately opened it to the first page. “Okay. What if I finish the book before morning?”

At that, Death Speaker grabbed another book. “This one has more advanced stuff, like how to give independence to an undead. If you somehow manage to finish this one before morning, then you should as well practice what you will learn by, for example, giving independence to your undead.”

“Okay. Thank you, Master Speaker.”

The minotaur raised an eyebrow as the “master”, then chuckled. She wasn’t wrong, and it felt good.

Meanwhile, Goldie looked out through a window. "Well, while she studies, I will go have a look at Klugetown. See if there are any local ghosts who could give some juicy info."

Twilight nodded, and the ghost flew through the window.

Chapter 9

Hours later, around midnight, Twilight had finished the two books and was now in the process of trying to give independence to one of her undead. The one she chose was Mickey, the rodent she sent to keep watch in Canterlot. With independence, it could decide what to do, who to watch, when to warn her. It was very important.

Through the two books, Twilight learned that the undead that she animated were extensions of her soul. So, while the links between her and them looked like they started from her magic, they actually started from her soul, which was deep inside her magic (so, no way to see it because of the magic surrounding it). So she guessed that, if she were to separate her soul from her body and put it into a phylactery, then the links would follow it, and another link would probably form between it and her body. She would have to confirm it by reading a more advanced book about liches if Death Speaker had one.

Anyway, so the undead she animated were actually part of her, so if she wanted to give them some independence, she had to give them a little bit of her soul. Nothing soul-damaging. The little soul pieces would still be linked to her, and if the undead was destroyed, it would return to her right away.

It didn’t mean that the undead will become her however. The soul was just the base, meaning that all her undead will share stuff with her, like probably her love of studying, or her apparent talent at magic, but Twilight could then mold it into something more different. She could give it a blank state and let the undead develop its own personality, or she could give to it the personality she wanted. For a spy like Mickey, making it the silent type would obviously be better. Careful, patient, calm…

But first, she had to give it a piece of her soul, and for that, she had to focus on her link. It took some time, but she was able to tear off a piece of her soul (which looked like a small little light) and guide it through the link to Mickey. Because of how far Mickey was, this process took longer, constantly having to stop the piece from returning to her main soul. She almost let it go a couple of times.

But finally, after an undetermined amount of time, she succeeded, and Mickey now had a piece of her soul.

Finally, she began the process of molding its personality. For that, all she had to do was to word it in the undead’s mind, like “You will be that and that and that, and also that.” She had no idea if it was a male or a female, but considering the name she gave to it, she chose male. She gave it the personality she determined a spy should have, and then… She decided “Why not?” and began to give him more details, like making him a good singer even if he probably won’t be able to sing to remain incognito, or giving him the habit of saying “Haha!”.

This made it another long process, Twilight being very thorough with the creation of her first sentient minion.

Once she was done, she said, And there! Finished! Wake up, Mickey! How do you feel?

I feel like I just came to life, even if I’m not really alive, ahah!

Well, it’s nice to meet you, Mickey. Uh… Do I need to present myself?

No need. I already know everything about you, Mistress Twilight. It must have come with the piece of your soul now within me.

Please, don’t call me ‘mistress’.

As your minion, I feel obligated to.

Well, let’s make it more friendly, please. I already consider you a friend.

Does it count as a friend when you made it yourself with a piece of you?

…Let’s make it yes.

Through Mickey’s eyes, she felt his body shake in a way that told her that he was silently laughing.

Very well. Instead, I shall take a page from Goldie’s book and call you Princess. You don’t mind that as much, ahah!

It’s still embarrassing when he calls me that.

But you are starting to like that little nickname. Don’t lie to me, I’m you, I know you.

Twilight groaned.

Anyway, I suppose then that you know your purpose.

Yes. Spying on the ponies here to see if anything interesting happens. I will try to spy on Princess Celestia, but I don’t know how well I will do inside the castle with all the servants and guards, especially the maids constantly cleaning it.

I’m sure that you will manage. You are small, fast, and I gave you the perfect personality to infiltrate. And you are smart, like me.

It did you good in the exam, Mickey said sarcastically.

I have learned my lesson! I will try to look at problems from different angles! So remember to do the same.

Will do. Well, I should use the cover of the night to try to enter the castle. It will be a nice start.

Alright. Be careful.

You made me careful, remember?

Of course I remember, I was just being a good friend.

Ahah! And I was messing with you.

Twilight groaned again before she left Mickey, returning to her own body. When she opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was Goldie.

“Hey, you are back, Princess. I waited a while.”

“What time is it?” she asked.

“About 3am.”

“Thanks. So, did you find any ghost who talked to you?”

“Yes, several. Lots of them are victims of murder. I also learned that this town practices slavery. I found a couple of ponies.”

Twilight recoiled in disgust. “Ponies are enslaved here?”

“Yes. No wonder the townsfolk wanted you so much. You are an undead and a pony. I guess that being a child didn’t make it better. Probably felt like you would make a very good pet.”

“Ugh. I can’t wait to have my lair so I can leave this town.”

“Yeah, but I learned something more worrying. The older ghosts told me that once a century, Celestia comes here to free the pony slaves, and next year will just so happen to be exactly one century since she last came here. If you want to continue to avoid her, then you will have to avoid being in town. I don’t know if the lair will be finished by then.”

“We will work day and night to make it in time. Did they tell you when exactly in the year she comes?”

“No, they didn’t, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she comes as soon as next year starts.”

“At worst, I can just remain out in the desert and wait for her to leave.”

“No, it’s not just this town that Princess Celestia will search, but the whole desert. There are villages here and there, as well as caravans. Any of them could have a pony slave.”

Twilight shrugged. “Then I will remain in the jungle. One minute.” She closed her eyes and focused back on Mickey. There are news. Princess Celestia will come to the desert, probably at the start of next year. If you manage to keep an eye on her, then tell me once she is about to leave.

Very well, Princess.

Thank you, Twilight said before she opened her eye sockets. “I warned Mickey. He will keep us informed.”

“The joy of having a spy constantly in contact. So, what now? There are a few hours left before the sun rises.”

“I will give independence to more of my undead, starting with Woofy and Tabby, and Felix. As my first undead, it should have more priority.”

“Alright. Meanwhile, I think that I will go play some… pranks on these slavers. I hate slavers.”

At that, Goldie left, leaving Twilight to do her stuff. Before he left, Twilight saw in his eyes that whatever… ‘prank’ he will give to the slavers will not be the fun kind.

Stopping thinking about that, Twilight closed her eyes and began to tear off a piece of her soul to give to Woofy. Her guards may be needed tomorrow, and them being independent will be much better.

Morning came, and Death Speaker woke up only to find Twilight still in the library with her eye sockets closed, and he guessed that she was in the process of giving independence to her undead.

He touched her on her horn and said, “Wake up once you are done with your current undead.” Then, he left to eat the breakfast that Sunshine had certainly prepared.

Twilight opened her eye sockets a few minutes later and found the minotaur in the dinner room downstairs, Goldie beside her, looking very grave. She didn’t dare to question him about what he did after he went to ‘prank’ the slavers.

As he ate, Death Speaker asked, “How many undead have you given a soul piece to?”

“Uh… About two dozen.”

“You should stop there then. You can only take so many pieces before your soul becomes unstable. Leave it to the undead you would consider your officers. Their independence will allow them to give orders to the undead you haven’t given a soul to.”

“Alright.”

“There are some shovels in the basement. We will take them so we can dig the tombs.”

Twilight looked away, still not wanting to do that. “...Okay…”

“Since you have a monkey, we will be able to take four.”

“The monkey is one of the undead I gave a piece of my soul to.”

“Good.”

Not long after, Death Speaker was done with his breakfast, and they went to the basement, passing the door beside the staircase.

It turned out that the basement was where Death Speaker stored his undead. There were many of them, just waiting to find a buyer.

The shovels were against the wall, five of them. The minotaur took three, and the filly took one.

Then, they left the house, Twilight remaining close with Woofy and Tabby following her. Death Speaker took Sunshine so she could transport food and water for him, and she will help them digging.

Twilight still couldn’t believe that she was going to desecrate some graves. Why had things gone so wrong?

Then, she heard a group of people beside who they walked.

“Have you heard? They found Derek dead in his house.”

“Really? How did he die?”

“His own sheets were used to strangle him in his sleep.”

“Eh. It was about time someone did something to that pig. He was just horrible.”

“Yeah, have you heard the rumor of what he did to that mare he owned?”

“Ugh… Don’t remind me. I would never do that to my slave if I had one. I have standards.”

“Not everyone is like you, sadly. Good riddance.”

A slaver owning a mare was killed?

Twilight looked at Goldie in horror.

Goldie saw her reaction and shook his head sadly. “You should have seen the state of the mare he owned. He was treating her very badly. I don’t think that she would have survived by next year. As a hero, I had to do something. He was a villain, she was an innocent in danger, so I did what I had to do. Hopefully, whoever will own her next will treat her better. I would have preferred that she escaped, but she was too weak to traverse the desert.”

Death Speaker snorted. “In my opinion, you did good.”

“Also, this rumor they spoke of? A ghost confirmed that it was true.”

Death Speaker looked sick. “Wretched creature.”

Twilight was scared to ask. “What… did he do to her?”

“You wouldn’t understand. I will explain to you while we traverse the desert.”

It wasn’t long after that they left Klugetown and walked northwest. Twilight told her monkey, who she named Lucy once she found out that she was female, to come, and Death Speaker gave a shovel to her.

Then they traversed the desert, which took a few days. While Twilight, Goldie, and Lucy could walk day and night, Death Speaker had to rest.

Eventually, they reached the end of the desert and arrived at a greener area with fir trees. It wasn’t long later that they reached the ocean, and their destination: the port known as Firwind. It was a small town, but it still had what they wanted: a cemetery.

“Now, we wait for the cover of the night,” Death Speaker said.

That was enough time for her to say that she refused to continue. That she didn’t want to dig out dead ponies.

But they already traversed the whole desert. Backing out now would be bad, having wasted all this time for nothing. Time was everything Twilight had, but not Death Speaker. Each second was precious to him, and Twilight would feel guilty.

So she said nothing and waited, trying not to think of what Death Speaker told her as they traversed the desert. That beings could do something so horrible… The poor mare will need a lot of help. Goldie helped her get it out of her mind by talking to her.

Night came, and Death Speaker said, “Let’s go.”

Hesitantly, Twilight nodded.

The cemetery was out of town, so there was no risk of encountering somepony, except maybe the guardian if it had one. It was fifty-fifty about that. A town so small may not have one, but being so close to the Bone Dry Desert, grave robbers may be a regular occurrence.

As they approached the cemetery, they found out that there was one. They could see him thanks to his torch. Thankfully, Twilight and Night Speaker didn’t have a torch. The minotaur, through the eyes of his vulture, had perfect night vision, like Twilight.

“What do we do now?” the filly whispered.

At that, the vulture flew from Night Speaker’s shoulder, toward the guardian from his blind spot. Then, it swooped and hit the guardian on the back of the head, knocking him down. Death Speaker then ran toward the guardian as he recovered from the hit and smashed him with the back of his shovel. The guardian barely had time to see his hooves as he was getting up before he was knocked out.

Twilight gasped as she ran after the minotaur. “Did you kill him?”

“No, he is just out cold. Hopefully for the next several hours. Now, we can dig.”

Beside Twilight, Lucy shrugged. “I guess that there was no other solution. So, which tomb first?”

“Preferably the older ones which are no longer maintained,” Death Speaker said.

“Hey! I don’t allow you to use the bodies of this cemetery for your dastardly schemes, necromancer!” they suddenly heard before the ghost of a gray earth pony stallion with a graying red mane came to the minotaur’s face, looking very angry. He looked to be in his sixties.

Death Speaker stared at the ghost, then looked away from him and at the tombstones, looking at the dates to see which were the oldest.

“Hey! Listen to me!” the stallion yelled, not liking being ignored.

“Sorry,” Twilight said to him. “I need ponies to build a lair in the jungle. Don’t worry, I’m not planning anything bad. I just want to study magic and necromancy away from ponies who would want to hurt me because of what I am.”

The stallion looked at her in surprise. “You aren’t one of his undead?”

Twilight shook her head. “No. I’m a lich.” She winced when she saw the dark look the stallion gave to her at that. “I’m not a bad lich. I promise. I didn’t ask to become one.”

“There is no need to pay attention to him,” Death Speaker said. “If he knows what is good for him, he won’t attack us. Mmh… Looks like this grave is the oldest one. Let’s dig.”

And so, Death Speaker, followed by Sunshine and Lucy, began to dig. Twilight gave an apologetic look at the stallion and went to help them.

Under the eyes of the stallion, and of a few other ghosts who approached but didn’t dare to try to stop them, they dug, getting a coffin out. Sunshine then gave Death Speaker a crowbar that he used to open the coffin, revealing the skeleton inside. A pegasus, male.

“Now, you can animate it,” the minotaur said.

Twilight nodded, then hesitantly approached. After several seconds of doubt, she finally fired the spell, animating the corpse.

Once the pegasus was out of the coffin, Death Speaker closed it and placed it back in the tomb.

“Now, we bury it,” he said.

Twilight nodded and helped him.

For the rest of the night, the process was repeated.

Author's Note

Firwind's name comes from this fanmade map I found: Link

Chapter 10

At first, it took them about an hour to dig out and bury a coffin. Then, at the third one, Twilight remembered that Woofy, being a wolf, a cousin of the dog, could certainly dig, so she asked him to help them, making it much faster. Thanks to that, they were able to dig a dozen graves, adding a dozen ponies to Twilight’s undead army. Six earth ponies, four pegasi, and two unicorns. About halfway through the night, Death Speaker had to knock out the guardian again as he had been beginning to wake up.

Because she was more familiar with unicorns, being one, she decided to give a piece of her soul to one of the unicorns, a mare that her tombstone said was named Star Eyes. Having no time to work on a personality for her, she gave her a blank one, like she did to most of her undead last night. The only ones who didn’t have a blank personality were Woofy and Tabby because, being her guards, they needed to have a tough personality.

Star Eyes was probably fated to be her main commander however, so she will have to give more work to her personality later, once she has time.

Having a blank personality meant that they mostly acted like Twilight with what was coming from her soul pieces within them, with room to learn and develop into their own beings. It helped that Twilight was still a child, so her young mind, transferred to the undead through her soul pieces, made it easier for them to learn and develop into beings other than clones of herself. And it made it easier for her soul pieces to adapt to their new bodies too.

Star Eyes could develop into a good commander if Twilight regularly made her command the other undead, helped with some books on “how to be a good commander” or something like that, but it would be faster if Twilight crafted her personality herself into what she thought would make a good commander.

And so, just a few minutes before the sun would rise, the group left the cemetery, starting their journey back to Klugetown where they will grab the necessary tools to start to work on building Twilight’s lair in the jungle.

During the journey, as soon as they rested for Death Speaker, Twilight used the occasion to work on Star Eyes’ personality.

Remembering what her brother told her, she gave her the two main qualities of a commander: charisma and audacity. Twilight, however, had difficulty thinking exactly what made somepony charismatic, so she went with her non-existent gut. Somepony who will treat her underlings well, confident, fun but who could get serious in an instant, and smart (of course, being a piece of Twilight, she was naturally smart, so she didn’t have to change that).

With most of the undead being mindless minions, it wasn’t really needed, but the undead to whom she gave independence will probably mind that.

She will be able to judge the situation and act accordingly without Twilight being forced to be at her side constantly. She will be able to make plans and improvise. She will be able to send the right minions to do the right tasks. And she will be able to give good advice to Twilight.

All she will need after that is experience.

Once she was done, Twilight stared at Star Eyes who gave her a salute.

“Commander Star Eyes, ready to serve, mistress.”

“Don’t call me that. Call me…” She sighed. “Call me Princess, I guess.”

Beside her, Goldie grinned.

“Also, uh… At ease. No need to be formal with me.”

The skeleton mare relaxed. “Very well, Princess.”

“So, uh… You already know what I’m planning, so once we are back in Klugetown, prepare everyone. We will go to the jungle to start digging the lair once we have the tools.”

Not long after that, they continued the journey through the desert.

Not long after they started, Death Speaker said, “You should also think of a plan for your lair. How you want the layout of the rooms and hallways to be. I will give you some paper to draw.”

“Uh. You are right. Thank you.”

So, back in Klugetown, while Death Speaker went to buy the necessary tools-axes, pickaxes, shovels, saws for cutting the wood into planks to make stuff like chairs and tables, chisels and hammers to sculpt the stone (because Twilight wanted to have brick walls and paved floor), etc…- Twilight began to think of what she wanted for the layout of her lair.

For starters, what room will it have? A library, of course. It will be a good start.

Normally, being an undead lair, it wouldn’t need rooms such as a kitchen, a dinner room, or a bedroom, but Death Speaker told her that he wanted to live with her so he could continue to teach her necromancy and magic, so she will have to add all that stuff. And she will have to think of adding a hole in the ceiling of the kitchen to let out the smoke whenever they cook.

A room to train in magic, of course. No doubt that there will be lots of magical accidents that may result in explosions as she will learn about it, so a large and solid room will be needed.

A study, where Death Speaker will teach her.

A room for potion making too. She knew nothing about potions, but it was part of what Death Speaker will teach her. As he said, a wizard worth his salt could brew any potion. It also meant that they will need a room to store ingredients, and she will have to regularly send her undead to search for them.

Oh, right, a storeroom will certainly be needed too.

She couldn’t think of anything else, so she wrote down the rooms she had in mind. She will ask Death Speaker’s opinion once he comes back.

Goldie looked at the list and said, “You are forgetting an armory.”

“An armory? Why would I need an armory? I don’t want to attack anybody.”

“But your undead may need to defend themselves. The whole world will be pretty much against them. And you. And if you add an armory, then you will have to add a smithy to make the armors and weapons.”

“I have no idea how to forge!”

“Then your undead will have to learn. Or you will have to buy them in Klugetown, but I don’t know if Death Speaker will have the money.”

Twilight looked at the list, then hesitantly put armory and smithy.

“We will have to find metal,” Twilight said.

“I remember a spell to find veins. If you can learn it, it shouldn’t be hard to find a deposit of iron ore.”

Twilight nodded, then proceeded to start drawing the plan of her lair with the rooms she listed. She started with an entrance room, just after the stairs leading down to her lair from the surface. From it, she drew a hallway to the right where she put Death Speaker’s apartment, his bedroom, kitchen, and so on. She made it close to the entrance mainly to make it easier to transport stuff to and from outside, because she doubted they would be able to add plumbing. It meant that she will have to place the entrance to her lair somewhere close to a source of water.

Done with Death Speaker’s apartment, she returned to the entrance room, which she guessed now that she thought about it will serve as a guard room, and drew at the left the armory, then the smithy.

Behind the entrance/guard room, she drew a hallway linking the library, the study, and the potion room. The library and the study were both at the left while the potion room was at the right, just before the study. She placed the room to store ingredients just behind the potion room.

At the end of the hallway, she placed the storeroom.

Finally, from the study, behind it, she placed the magic training room.

So far, the plan looked good.

Later, when Death Speaker and Sunshine returned with the bought tools, she showed the plan to him.

“Mmh… Yes, it’s mostly good, except for the magic training room. You should place it further away for security purposes. Separate it from the rest with a long hallway.”

“Okay. Any other rooms I should add?”

“A room for your undead to spend their time in when they aren’t outside. Since you gave souls to a good number of them, you should find ways for them to pass time. And you too by the same occasion.”

“Oh, for that, you can count on the library. If they are like me, then they will love reading books. Uh, maybe I should make the library bigger.”

“Still, some kind of… game room would be a good addition. You wouldn’t want to spend eternity bored to death.”

Twilight gave him a flat look. “I’m already dead.”

“Which makes it worse.”

“Death Speaker is right. You won’t be able to spend time by pranking others like I did,” Goldie said. “Having a form of entertainment will be nice. You will already have a library, but the number of books you will have will be rather limited for now, and it will be difficult to get new ones, so games will be good. If you can send undead to find board games, it will be nice. Also, I spied a few Ogres And Oubliettes games if you are interested.”

“Alright, I’m adding a game room,” Twilight said before she looked at the plan. “I will turn the hallways linking the guard room to the library and the other rooms into a T, going between the library and the study, and it will lead to the game room. I will put some distance between it and the other rooms so the noise made there will not bother the ones reading, or me when I’m studying.”

“Leave space in the hallways for expansions in the future. You never know,” Death Speaker said.

“True. I may need to eventually dig a second library if I manage to collect enough books.”

“You intend to steal other libraries? There is only this way I can see you getting so many books.”

“No! I refuse to steal other libraries! But… Maybe bookstores… A book here and there… From time to time… Unless we manage to find books in Klugetown.”

“Rarely of pony origin.”

“You mean, books from other countries?” Twilight said, and Death Speaker would swear that he saw the little purple flames inside her eye sockets turn into stars briefly.

“Yes.”

Twilight squealed and began to jump around the minotaur while repeating “Yes!”

Death Speaker raised an eyebrow. “You love books, uh?”

“Yes!”

Death Speaker wasn’t sure if she answered him or if it was another of her repeated “Yes!”

He chuckled.

Finally, with everything ready, they left Klugetown, going toward the jungle, Twilight with her whole army and Death Speaker bringing all the undead in his basement along with Sunshine and his vulture.

A few days later, they arrived at the jungle. The two then sent their undead to search for a water source, and before long, they found a river. Twilight also used the spell Goldie talked about earlier, the one to find ore deposits, that she learned on the way to the jungle thanks to one of Death Speaker’s books, to search for a deposit of iron ore hopefully not far from the river so they won’t have to go far to get it for the smithy.

Twilight was able to locate several deposits, but impossible to tell what kind of ore they were as most of them were underground, so they will have to dig. There was another spell to identify what kind of ore there was, but she hadn’t been able to learn it yet.

While she searched for the deposits, Death Speaker determined a good location for the lair, not too far from the river but far enough that they wouldn't risk accidentally digging into it. He found a spot with a good landmark in the form of a tree older and larger than the others. While they will have to cut some trees to make place for the entrance, they will leave this one.

When Death Speaker showed the spot, Twilight agreed right away and ordered her undead to start clearing the trees (except the big one) and dig, and Death Speaker did the same with his undead, leaving Sunshine to command them.

They found limestone, and Death Speaker taught Twilight and her undead how to make mortar for when they will start to sculpt bricks, telling them that they will have to make a lime kiln to make lime, one of the ingredients.

And so, the making of Twilight’s lair began.

Of course, at the same time, she used the occasion that she was in the jungle to find more dead animals to reanimate, making them help with whatever they could do. Dumbo, the elephant, for example, was very good at uprooting the trees using all the weight of his skeletal body. It was much faster than cutting them with axes. Woofy, along with the other wolves she found and a few other animals that could dig, helped the undead with shovels. The soil here revealed to be very deep, so they had to dig a while before finding the top layer of rock.

And it was only the beginning. It promised many months of constant hard work.

Chapter 11

Author's Note

Happy New Year!

Chapter 11

Months passed as Twilight worked on her lair, although she spent most of this time on trips to cemeteries in Equestria to get herself more pony undead to use as workforce to accelerate the work, leaving Star Eyes to oversee. Death Speaker also regularly returned to Klugetown to sell his undead and use the money to buy more tools and other stuff.

To move from the jungle to Equestria, she rode on Woofy’s back while being followed by three pony skeletons each transporting shovels. These times, Twilight thought of bringing more shovels than their number suggested they should bring, because as soon as Twilight animated a new pony skeleton, she could immediately make it work to help them dig bodies faster.

The advantage with going to Equestria instead of returning to Firwind was that, there, most towns didn’t have a cemetery guardian, because nopony dared disrupt the dead. Only the cities generally had one, and Twilight remained away from these because it would be too easy to be spotted by ponies awake during the night.

She never went far to the north however, beyond Canterlot. The farthest she went was Ponyville, after going through the Everfree Forest. When predators don’t bother you because you are now only made of bones, the forest offers a nice stroll. She just had to be careful to avoid cockatrices to avoid being petrified, but those were rather rare, thankfully. She still let one of her undead ahead just in case.

She tried to avoid getting groups too big. Large groups were a good way to be spotted, especially by pegasi, which was why she limited herself to one town per trip. Going to and from Equestria didn’t take long however. Their undead stamina allowed them to travel without stopping, they didn’t have muscles to ache when they were running, allowing them to run faster than normal, and they traversed through the Badlands instead of taking the detour through the jungle and swamp. Thanks to that, it only took a few days to reach Equestria instead of the weeks it took for Twilight the first time she went south. Also, right outside the Badlands was Dodge City which offered a nice spot for her to get some easy undead.

She didn’t bring only ponies. She was lucky enough to find a griffon. And of course, there were the few dead animals she found. In the Everfree Forest, she especially took the time to try to find some of the local fauna, and she was able to return home with a manticore.

Thanks to that, her army grew quite a bit, and before long, she had over one hundred ponies (and one griffon) working on her lair, and also digging where she found the ore deposits to determine if there was any iron.

Between trips, Death Speaker taught her various things, like how to create objects with clay, carve wood, and sculpt stone, and she was able to help make a kiln to get lime. Then she followed the instructions the minotaur gave weeks earlier on how to make mortar.

Once, Death Speaker took Twilight on a journey all over the jungle to find potential potion ingredients and explain to her what potions they could be used for. Another time, he showed her how to craft simple tools with sticks and stone, allowing her to make more tools for her undead while waiting for Death Speaker to return from Klugetown with tools of better quality.

Of course, many of her intelligent undead were at her sides, eager to learn too. They really were parts of her.

Sadly, magic and necromancy teaching had to wait for when they would be fully settled in the lair.

Thankfully, with all the undead Twilight was bringing, it was advancing well. Following Twilight’s plan, the first room, the guard room, was dug and in the process of having its walls and ceiling being covered by bricks while the floor was paved while they also worked on digging Death Speaker’s apartment so he will have a nicer place to sleep than outside in the jungle. Undead readied the materials that will be needed to craft the furniture once the rooms are ready.

Of course, this meant that many trees had to be cut, but Twilight made sure to instruct her undead to avoid cutting the trees at the same place, especially around the lair. If there was a clearing around her lair, it would be much easier to spot. So the undead spread out to cut trees here and there.

After a few months, Twilight looked at her army of undead and thought that leaving them outside once the lair was finished wouldn’t be good, so she got the idea of adding a room to store them, like Death Speaker’s basement, but much larger, so she began to work on making such a room linked to her armory, under the stairs. She left space for the armory to expand, feeling that, with her growing army, more space will be needed to store the armors and weapons.

For the ventilation needed to evacuate smoke from the kitchen and the smithy, Twilight used small animals that could burrow to dig through the dirt. Following Goldie’s advice, she made them dig miles of small tunnels so the smoke would be evacuated far away from the lair, not compromising its location. When it was time for them to dig vertically through the stone to reach the rooms, she equipped them with miniature pickaxes. For the water seeping through the soil when it rained, barrels were placed under the holes. If the barrels started to fill too much, new barrels could be put in their place, and an ape would transport the filled barrels to the storeroom, the water in them ready to be used to make potions (once distilled).

Yes, she found an ape.

As soon as the smithy was done, she decided to make her griffon, Gerard, the black-smith, giving him a piece of her soul. Immediately, he began to learn to forge stuff with the iron they found. Through trials and errors, he was quickly getting better. It wasn’t long before Twilight began to regularly join him to learn too.

When the library was finished, Death Speaker brought his books back from Klugetown, along with objects from his house like his ram skull, or Grogar’s portrait. Twilight let him borrow several of her undead to help him so he only had to do one trip.

The weeks before the game room’s completion, Twilight sent her undead all over Equestria in search of board games to bring back. Goldie also began to teach her how to play Ogres And Oubliettes, however, he admitted that there were probably rules that he didn’t know, so Twilight promised to find a rule book, which shouldn’t be difficult in a bookstore. Goldie still knew enough that he was able to help her start a mage character.

Before they knew it, Hearth Warming passed, then the new year began, and the lair was almost finished.

However, Twilight instructed her undead to keep an eye in the sky, because the date where Princess Celestia was coming to Klugetown was fast approaching, and it was possible that she could find the lair somehow.

Finally, it was time. Time for Celestia to fly toward Klugetown and, hopefully, find Twilight Sparkle, in addition to certainly freeing a few ponies from slavery. And if she didn’t find the filly, then at least a sign that she had been there, and… hopefully, that she didn’t board an airship to who knew where.

However, something said that this may not be the case. She received reports these last few months from towns all over the south half of Equestria that their cemeteries had been disturbed. The locals found several graves with their soil looking as if it had been dug during the night. Fearing the worst, they dug out the coffins of these graves and found them empty. Somepony had taken the dead inside.

Interestingly, the targeted graves were all old ones that nopony took care of anymore.

This could be the act of a group of grave robbers, probably taking the bones inside the coffins to sell them outside of Equestria. Pony bones could be used in some potions.

However, it was very possible that Twilight Sparkle was the one doing this to reanimate the dead.

This was both good and bad. It meant that Twilight Sparkle was making for herself a small army of undead, and Celestia could only guess why. Also, that the filly was now willing to disturb cemeteries was worrying. However, she was targeting ponies that were already dead. She received no reports of ponies disappearing, so Twilight Sparkle wasn’t killing to grow her army faster.

She also received a report of a mass robbery in a bookstore in Dodge City, dozens of books stolen during the night, which made Celestia chuckle despite the crime. Shining Armor told her about his sister’s love of books, and with no direct access to a library because of her… condition, she understood that the filly was finding other ways to get books.

Also, if she was hoarding books, it meant that she had a library of her own at least, meaning that she must have settled somewhere. The question, of course, was “Where?”

Again, that she was willing to steal was worrying, but she could forgive the filly for such actions. With her… condition, there was no way her ponies would let her buy anything, so resorting to robbery wasn’t surprising. It was still bad, but understandable. She needed to get books on magic to learn her special talent somehow, and she doubted that Klugetown would provide.

And so, Celestia, followed by an escort of pegasi guards, took off from her balcony, flying south.

Unbeknown to her, Mickey, hidden in a bush not far, saw her flying. He sadly wasn’t able to enter the castle. There were simply too many guards and servants, without forgetting the nobles and visitors, for him to be able to sneak around and remain hidden. He would be spotted very rapidly. Still, he was still able to get a good position to observe the castle, allowing him to see Celestia flying away.

Of course, she could have gone flying for any reason, but Mickey easily guessed the real one. They were the third of January after all. Now that the new year festivities were over, Celestia could do what Mickey had been warned she would do: go south to Klugetown.

And so, he warned Twilight.

Princess, this is The Rat, the wolf has left the den, over.

…What are you talking about?

Mickey sighed. I was just trying to sound cool by speaking in codes like a real spy. I meant that Princess Celestia has left to Klugetown.

Thank you. And next time you want to speak in codes, make sure that I know in advance what the codes mean.

Oh, of course. Ahah.

Celestia and her escort followed the railway south of Appleloosa, going through the Macintosh Hills and between the jungle at the east and the forest at the west. Soon enough, they were flying above the Bone Dry Desert, and they reached Klugetown.

She made sure to make her arrival as dramatic as possible to impress the locals and make it easier for her to be obeyed. Of course, as soon as she announced why she was here, some tried to fight her, but Celestia showed her power, making them cower after over thirty thugs were knocked out, many of them badly burned. After this show of force, the inhabitants were more willing to let her have her way, and they told her who had a pony slave.

In total, she found three ponies. Two mares and one stallion, two earth ponies and one pegasus.

One of the mares pretty much threw herself at her hooves to thank her, and Celestia could see why. While the other mare and the stallion looked healthy, if a bit thin, this mare had several scars all over her body that she could guess the origin of. She immediately glared at who had been her owner, a bipedal lizard.

The ex-owner raised his hands in defense. “I’m not the one who put her in this state. You can thank Derek for that, may his soul burn for eternity.”

“And where is this Derek?” she asked coldly.

“His ashes have been spread in the desert.”

“I see. How bad was it?”

“Very bad. She was covered in her own blood, she stunk worse than a skunk, she was skin and bones, she was very sick, she was scared of speaking, and she will certainly never get in bed with a male.”

By the time the guy finished speaking, Celestia was giving her best hug to the mare.

“I tried to make it better so she could work for me, but it was very difficult. I was actually thinking of letting her go. It was more pain than it was worth,” the guy continued.

“Even if it was for selfish reasons, I thank you for helping her. We will take over,” Celestia said.

“If it hadn’t been for Derek suddenly dying, she certainly wouldn’t have survived. She is very lucky.”

Celestia raised an eyebrow. “How did he die?”

“Nobody is sure actually, but I suspect Death Speaker to be involved. Derek’s home was locked and there was no break-in, and yet, one morning, he was found strangled by his own cover, and there is no way this sl-uh, mare would have been able to do it. So I think that Death Speaker sent a ghost to deal with him. As for why he would do that, I have no idea, he gained nothing by doing that.”

“Death Speaker?”

“Oh yeah, he is a necromancer. If you look around, you can see the undead that he sold.”

Maybe…?

“Have you seen an undead filly by his side?” she asked.

“Yeah yeah, he found one several months ago. He never sold her for some reason. Folks were ready to pay a fortune to get her as their pet. I guess that he decided to keep her as he was seen several times after that with her tagging along.”

Hope filled Celestia. “Where does he live?”

“You won’t find him in Klugetown anymore. He recently sold his house, and he left the town with some of his belongings. He apparently left by the desert, so he probably went north. No idea where, he told nobody.”

Celestia sighed. “What about the filly?”

“She hasn’t been seen in a while. Since she went to the desert months ago with several undead transporting tools fleshly bought by Death Speaker, she didn’t come back to Klugetown.”

“Tools?”

“Yeah. For some reason, Death Speaker was seen buying many tools in the last few months. axes, pickaxes, shovels, saws, hammers, and so on.”

“I see. Thank you very much for all this information.” At that, she gave him a bag full of bits. “I know that you don’t use bits here, but you should be able to find some use for the gold they contain.”

“It was my pleasure,” the guy said while looking greedily in the bag.

With that, Celestia left with the mare. Done with Klugetown, she teleported herself and all her ponies across the desert, to Firwind, where they will take the train.

But first, Celestia thought about all she learned about Twilight Sparkle and this Death Speaker in Klugetown.

Twilight Sparkle was in Klugetown and found a necromancer named Death Speaker. Goldie was also probably the one who killed Derek and saved this mare, but Celestia wasn’t sure if the killing had been necessary. Don’t get her wrong, she knew very well that there were times when you had to kill, but maybe there could have been a way to save the mare without killing Derek, and she didn’t think that Goldie thought of alternatives.

Goldie always had a strong sense of justice, wanting to help others and stop villains. However, he had the impulsivity of a colt who read lots of books where the villain ended up killed by the hero, so he probably thought right away that Derek deserved death for everything he did to that mare. He never took time to think if there was another way, he went straight for the kill, thinking that it was just.

Or Goldie really took time to think of alternatives and found none, but Celestia doubted that. He could have told Twilight Sparkle about Derek, and Twilight would have helped save the mare, probably sending her undead to deal with Derek without killing him. Celestia didn’t know what undead the filly had by then, but considering that she went through the swamp and the jungle, she probably got quite a few strong ones.

Celestia sighed. so it looked like her nephew became a vigilante, one of the ruthless kind.

But back to Twilight Sparkle. She and Death Speaker apparently began to work on a project, and they went north to make it.

She could guess what project it was.

A lair.

She did think earlier that Twilight Sparkle had settled somewhere so she could start to hoard books. For a moment, she thought that it was Death Speaker’s house, but since he sold it, then it left only a lair, which was certainly finished or near finished by now.

No wonder Twilight Sparkle went around Equestria to get herself undead ponies. She had needed the workforce to build the lair. This reassured Celestia. She wasn’t building an army to invade Equestria. Undead armies were always annoying to fight.

Unless Twilight Sparkle planned to invade Equestria after building her lair…

…She will avoid thinking the worst. Twilight Sparkle had no reason to invade Equestria.

Except the feeling of being ostracized by her fellow ponies because of being an undead, so she may seek revenge.

But she left on her own accord.

After she was told that Celestia would kill her.

…

Anyway, where could she have built a lair?

Immediately, a place came to mind: the jungle. Not many ponies dared to go there, and it would be easy to get strong undead animals there. It would be easy to hide a lair. There were lots of natural resources, hidden or not, ready to be used. And she didn’t have to worry about predators going after her in her state. And if she needed anything from civilization, she just had to travel the desert for a few days to reach Klugetown while she was close enough to Equestria that she could send undead to collect things like she did with the books.

It really was the perfect place to build a lair, so the most likely place where she would find Twilight Sparkle. Although, the filly proved that she could go against her expectations, like when she took the direction of Baltimare instead of going toward the Everfree Forest, so she wasn’t one hundred percent sure. Maybe she went instead to the forest surrounding the Arimaspi Territory, but the trees there were more spaced, so it would be easier to spot a lair from the sky, without forgetting that the arimaspis often descended from their mountains into the forest, and if one ever found Twilight’s lair, it would go very badly.

So, leaving behind her escort, she flew toward the jungle.

However, as she expected, she couldn’t find the lair. The trees just didn’t allow her to see anything. She flew back and forth, again and again, in vain. And searching on the ground would be like searching for a needle in a haystack while having to deal with the many predators.

So she lit her horn, ready to cast a large scale scanning spell that would allow her to find the lair, but she quickly hesitated.

Twilight Sparkle was certainly scared now, and using magic would only scare her more, and the filly would send her undead to fight her and Celestia would have to fight, making herself look even scarier, and it would be even harder for Twilight to trust her.

Instead, she chose to try her speciality: diplomatie. Activating her Royal Canterlot Voice, she yelled, “TWILIGHT SPARKLE! IF YOU ARE HERE, PLEASE, SHOW YOURSELF! I PROMISE, I WILL NOT HURT YOU! I ONLY WISH TO SPEAK TO YOU!”

On the ground, Twilight heard her perfectly, but Death Speaker then put a hand on her head.

“Don’t fall for her trap. She is just trying to make you reveal yourself so she can kill you.”

Goldie glared at the minotaur. “Celestia would never stoop so low!”

“This is the same mare who banished her own sister to the moon, and remember that every liches she faced until now were power hungry conquerors, so she certainly thinks that Twilight is the same and seeks to end her threat. And if she can’t find her, then of course, she tries to use tricks. She is a smart one.”

Twilight remained silent as she listened, then she nodded sadly.

In the sky, after waiting several minutes, Celestia sighed. “IF YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND, COME TO CANTERLOT! THE DOORS WILL BE OPEN FOR YOU!”

With that, she left, flying back to Firwind. She hoped that Twilight Sparkle heard her, and would listen to her.

There was only ten years left before Nightmare Moon returned. That was more than enough time for the filly to appear, if she ever appeared.

Chapter 12

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Chapter 13

Before Twilight knew it, two years passed, spent studying under Death Speaker, animating new undead, reading books, and playing games with her undead.

Since she finished her lair, she stopped reanimating ponies, not needing them anymore. She still kept the ones she had.

But one day, during a lesson, Death Speaker suddenly found himself distracted, and he frowned.

“A problem, Master Speaker?” Twilight asked.

“Maybe… My vulture spotted an airship above the Bone Dry Desert,” Death Speaker answered.

“What is special about this airship? There are many of them flying above the desert.”

“I recognize this design… It’s one of the ships of the Storm King.”

“The Storm King? Who is he?”

“A conqueror. He conquered many countries this last decade, plundering their wealths and especially hoarding magical artifacts. I had hoped that his airships would never come to this region. My vulture only spotted one airship however. Probably a scout.”

Death Speaker continued to look through the eyes of his vulture, frowning more and more.

“Mmh… They are going toward a shipwreck. One crashed not long ago. Seems like it had something the Storm King wants. With some luck, once he gets whatever it is there is in this wreck, we will not hear of the Storm King again.”

Twilight became worried. “What if he is coming to conquer Equestria?”

“If this is the case, it is not our problem. Celestia will deal with him. Mmh? Oh? There is a pony at the shipwreck. Whatever the Storm King’s minions are searching, she seems to have it.”

Twilight hesitated. “Maybe I should send undead to help her.”

“No need, she is managing to escape. She has a broken horn, but she managed to distract the minions with her magic.” He sighed. “Which means that the Storm King will remain in the region to chase her, and we will see more of his airships around. Damn it.”

“Then I will send my birds all over the desert to keep an eye on the situation, and I will have one follow the mare.”

Death Speaker nodded.

“I don’t understand why you continue to send the vulture to search for corpses in the desert. You know that if you need corpses to sell, then I can easily find some for you in the jungle.”

“I know, but in the desert, there are more chances to find bodies that would be worth more in the eyes of the klugetowner. Bodies of travelers that succumbed to the desert.”

“Oh, I see.”

After that, what Death Speaker predicted happened. More of the Storm King’s airships appeared, searching all over the desert and beyond. A couple even passed above the jungle. Thankfully, they didn’t spot the lair.

In one of the airships, the Storm King, a tall satyr slash yeti-like creature in black armor, was having a meal when one of his storm creatures, large yeti-like creatures in armor, including a helmet, entered.

“Sir, we spotted something.”

This pleased the satyr. “Ah. Is this the mare with the Malachite?”

“Uh… No, sir.”

The Storm King’s expression immediately shifted to annoyance. “Then what is so important that you need to bother me during my meal? This can’t be another pirate attack.”

“Not pirates, sir, but… we spotted a skeleton bird flying not far from the airship.”

The Storm King raised an eyebrow. “A skeleton bird? Mmh… Show me.”

Going on the bridge of the airship, the storm creature, followed by the Storm King, joined one of his bethrens.

“Where is the bird?” the first creature asked the other who pointed a finger at the sky. The Storm King followed the direction of the finger and spotted the bird.

“I see, I see. So it seems that there is a necromancer in the region, and they are keeping an eye on us.”

“What do we do, sir?” one of the creatures asked.

The Storm King waved dismissively. “Leave it be. It doesn’t matter. Continue following the trail of the mare while I return to my meal.”

“Very well.”

Twilight saw all this through the eyes of the bird.

“I saw a tall creature that looks like some kind of monkey with white fur. He commands the others.”

“That’s the Storm King,” Death Speaker revealed.

“He doesn’t seem to have any magical power.”

“But like I said, he gathers magical artifacts, so you can be sure that he will use some if you end up fighting him. He is especially known to use the Staff of Sacanas, which can manipulate the weather and absorb magic. Remember that your magic is what is keeping your soul bound to your body, so if he ends up taking it, you are dead. Worse, your soul may be absorbed along with your magic, and you could end up trapped in the staff.”

“Uh… Then I will avoid getting close to him.”

Eventually, the worst happened, and not only the Storm King found the mare, but said mare sold Equestria so the Storm King could give her a new horn, becoming his new second in command.

When she heard through the bird the Storm King getting interested in Equestria, Twilight decided to act.

“I will not let him invade Equestria! Sorry, Master Speaker, but we will have to postpone the lessons. I’m dealing with that guy.”

Goldie grinned. “Heck yeah!”

Death Speaker frowned. “Are you sure about that? You are speaking of going to war, and right now, the Storm King has the superior army. Dozens of airships full of storm creatures, hulking beasts armed, armored, and trained.”

Twilight hesitated, but then, she affirmed her resolve. “I must still do something! I don’t want him to invade Equestria! And I have the ability to face him!”

“Why does it matter to you? You abandoned Equestria. If you showed yourself there, they would fear you, and maybe even hunt you.”

“Maybe, but the ponies don’t deserve being invaded. Also, my family lives there, and I still love them.”

Death Speaker sighed.

Twilight exited the study and went to the library where she found Star Eyes.

“Star Eyes! Prepare the undead! The Storm King wants to invade Equestria, and we will stop him!”

star Eyes immediately closed her book, got up, and saluted. “Yes, Princess!”

“We need more pony soldiers!” Twilight said. “I don’t know how long we have until the Storm King invades, but let’s act quickly! So you will spread the undead into groups to dig graves in several towns at the same time and bring the corpses to me. You will need carts to transport the dead, so start building some. And like always, start with the oldest tombs, and if there is a guardian, try to knock them out without injuring them. And of course, try to not be spotted.”

“Very well.”

After that, Twilight went to the smithy.

“Gerard, we will need more weapons and armors. A villain wants to conquer Equestria.”

“Alright, Princess. Let me do my magic, and you will have more stuff than you will know what to do.”

“If you feel like the production is not fast enough, take an undead or two to be your assistants. Don’t hesitate to tell me if the smithy needs to be expanded too.”

“I may need more iron than what we are getting.”

“I will send undead to start working on another of the iron deposits we found when we started building the lair.”

Later, she was outside her lair, and facing her was the totality of her soulless undead animals, from the smallest rodents to the elephants. Only part of the birds weren’t present because they were already a bit everywhere being her eyes on the Storm King and his airships.

“I want all of you to spread everywhere that isn’t inhabited and to find and bring to me as many corpses as possible. Make sure to bring all their bones if they are skeletons. Try to not be spotted. Now, go!”

As soon as she finished, the animals scattered.

“Do you think you will have enough time?” Goldie asked.

“I hope,” Twilight answered. Then, she thought of something. Star Eyes? Put to priority finding pegasi. We will need them against the Storm King’s airships. Griffins would work too if you find some.

You got lucky with Gerard. There aren’t many griffins in Equestria, especially outside of Cloudsdale where the bodies are burned and the ashes scattered in the sky.

I know, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t find another one or two.

The best would be to send pegasi to Griffonstone.

True. Do so. Oh, and send an undead to the Dragon Lands to see if we can’t find at least one dragon skeleton. It would be very useful.

We would have to bring you there to reanimate it. There is no way we can transport such huge bones.

I know.

As the days passed, Twilight trained to fight. She intended to remain away from the frontline. If she died, all her undead would die with her, and it would be too risky with the Storm King and his staff, but it was better to be prepared if something unexpected happened that forced her to fight. Death Speaker already trained her a lot since she finished her lair, so she wouldn’t be useless in a fight, but more training was never bad.

Her undead began to bring corpses to her to reanimate, growing her army again little by little.

She kept an eye on the Storm King who began to build his own lair on an island southwest of the south coast. So he decided to settle here, and it showed as he took control of Klugetown. He even got himself a pirate crew to transport cargo for him. However, it looked like he wouldn’t invade Equestria right away. The mare now working for him certainly told him about Celestia, and he must be searching for a way to defeat her first.

That was good news for Twilight because it meant that she had time to prepare, and she will be able to battle the Storm King on her own terms. The Storm King also had no idea of what she was doing. He spotted her bird, but he didn’t see it, or her, as a threat. He thought that she was just a necromancer cautiously keeping an eye on him to not get any bad surprise.

A couple of weeks later, however, the Storm King did something that she hadn’t expected. He invaded Mount Aris, the home of the hippogriffs. It was then that Death Speaker told her that the hippogriffs possessed a powerful pearl. Of course, as soon as the Storm King learned about such an artifact, he tried to get it. However, apparently, he failed, and the hippogriffs disappeared with it.

She hoped they were alright.

Still, she continued to prepare. She had to expand the armory and the smithy, she had to start working on a third iron deposit, and she gave pieces of her soul to a few pony undead to be her officers under Star Eyes’ orders.

However, some of her undead ended up being spotted by the ponies, causing quite the fright, so she was forced to reduce the number of undead in Equestria, reducing the number of bodies being brought to her. She still managed to grow her army a lot before this happened, even getting herself a dragon and a hydra. Reanimating these giant creatures proved to be very hard however as it took the totality of her mana pool, forcing her to rest for hours after that. The same happened when she reanimated too many undead too quickly.

When Death Speaker saw the dragon, he was very impressed.

“Very few necromancers could boast to manage to reanimate a dragon, but I guess that I shouldn’t be surprised with your Cutie Mark,” he said. “You really have the potential to be as great as Thanatos himself.”

Twilight felt like blushing. “Uh… Thanks.”

“And your mana pool is still growing as you hadn’t reached maturity when you died. I can only imagine how big it will be once you reach it in a few years. You may actually reach the level of the legendary Starswirl the Bearded.”

Twilight gasped. “Really?!”

The minotaur nodded. “Maybe you may even surpass him.”

Twilight looked away, feeling like blushing. “There is no way…”

“Since I’m telling you.”

Goldie hugged the filly. “You hear that? You will become the most powerful lich ever! That’s so awesome!”

“C-come on!”

“Just take the bucking compliment, you silly filly!”

She giggled, then hugged Goldie back.

After that, of course, she gave a piece of her soul to the dragon. There was no way she could leave her as one of her dumb soulless undead. Thankfully, the dragon being much bigger didn’t mean that it needed a bigger piece of soul.

Also, Twilight named her Sunny.

The Storm King will have a very nasty surprise.

Celestia read the reports of undead activity seen all across Equestria, and she was wondering what Twilight Sparkle was preparing. The number of tombs disturbed these last few weeks numbered in the thousands, and that wasn’t counting the undead seen transporting the bodies of animals. This time, after two years of silence, it looked like the filly really was building an army, and Celestia hesitated to go look at what was going on in the South. She wanted to trust that Equestria wasn’t about to be invaded by an undead army, but if Twilight Sparkle was building an army and it wasn’t to invade, then what could it be for? Was there a threat that appeared that needed such a force? Or was Twilight Sparkle building a kingdom for herself?

She could at least be more careful. Now, Celestia had to reassure her scared ponies that there wasn’t an undead invasion, hopefully. Thankfully, Twilight only disturbed the oldest tombs, so there weren’t many ponies asking her to recover the stolen bodies.

The main problem was the Apple Clan. Twilight ended up taking quite a number of Apple ancestors all over Equestria, including Granny Smith’s parents in Ponyville, and the Apples hadn’t liked that at all.

Considering that she discovered that one Applejack was one of the potential Element Bearers…

Celestia groaned.

Finally, Twilight felt that she was ready to take on the Storm King and his infamous armada.

Over seven thousand ponies in total, plus one hundred griffins, a dragon, and even a couple of minotaurs and donkeys. And there was the occasional sapient creature found dead in the desert.

To that, she could add several thousand animals of all kinds, mainly small ones, but clouds of birds and large groups of rodents could be as effective as a hydra, which she now had too. Too bad she couldn’t find a roc.

She even managed to build some weapons like ballistas and catapults, and she even got her hooves on some cannons found in the shipwreck from several weeks ago, when Death Speaker first told her about the Storm King.

If Twilight wasn’t stuck with an eternal grin, she would smirk. “Bring it on!”

Chapter 14

Now that Twilight was ready to fight the Storm King, there was one last thing left to answer: how to gain the Storm King’s attention. His lair (that he was still building) being on an island, she couldn’t send her army to attack it, she didn’t have any airship to transport all of them. So she had to bring the Storm King to the desert somehow.

She then got an idea: sending a cloud of birds to attack one of the airships. Such an assault should convince the Storm King to come to her.

So she sent hundreds of birds toward one of the airships patrolling the sky around the Storm King’s island. Such a cloud was quite the scary sight.

She ordered her birds to not kill. Not just because she still wasn’t sure about killing something, even if she was about to start a war, but also because she needed the airship’s crew to report to the Storm King about the attack. However, she allowed the birds to injure the storm creatures as much as possible.

Through the eyes of one of the birds, she watched the assault on the airships. The storm creatures saw them approaching, but they didn’t have time to prepare before the birds were on them. The birds then began to scratch them with their claws and to peck them with their beaks.

The birds quickly revealed to have difficulty breaching the armor of the storm creatures, but they were able to remove the helmets, exposing the creatures’ head (which looked like the Storm King’s head). That was all the birds needed.

Twilight winced when she saw one of her birds peck an eye out.

The storm creatures tried to defend themselves, but even if they were hulking beasts, they couldn’t do much against so many birds. They were swinging their staves around, but it only allowed them to kill a few birds. Twilight felt the links disappear. Compared to the hundreds present, that wasn’t a lot. The creatures also tried to cover their head with their shields, which worked better, but then, the birds attacked the legs, making the creatures topple and opening their guard.

After several minutes, the birds retired, leaving a very miserable crew. All of them were bloody, covered in scratches at best. The worst cases lost their two eyes, becoming blind.

Now, she had to wait to see how the Storm King will react.

The Storm King admired from his flagship the immense tower that he was building for himself. Truthfully, he hadn’t expected getting a lair until he had conquered the world as he had been constantly going from country to country with his armada, never settling somewhere for long.

However, now that he knew about Equestria, he had to remain close while he prepared to invade it, so a lair became necessary.

When he learned about the hippogriffs and their Pearl of Transformation, he thought that he could have used it to invade Equestria right away, but then, the hippogriffs disappeared who knew where with it, ruining this plan. So now, the Storm King had to settle for the long wait as he tried to find a way to deal with Princess Celestia. Tempest Shadow told him about her, and if she was as powerful as she said she was, then his usual method of invasion would be met with failure.

The goal was to find a way to immobilize her long enough so he could absorb her magic with his staff before she could destroy his armada. Easier said than done…

But he was the Storm King! He will eventually find something, now matter how long it will take for him to find it! He already had several ideas in mind.

Suddenly, one of his storm creatures came.

“Sir, one of the patrolling airships is approaching.”

The Storm King raised an eyebrow. “Why would they stop patrolling?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

At his side, Tempest Shadow said, “Something probably happened. We should see what they have to say.”

“Yes, yes. Let’s see,” the satyr replied.

Before long, the approaching airship was beside his, and he was able to board it, only to find the crew in a sad state, all of them injured quite badly.

One of the less injured storm creatures approached him, limping.

“What happened? Who did that to you?” the Storm King immediately asked.

“Skeleton birds. Hundreds of them,” the storm creature answered before he showed the skull of one of the birds that had been killed.

The Storm King grabbed the skull, looked at it, then growled and crushed it in his hand.

“So the necromancer seems to have decided to make me an enemy.”

“Maybe they consider this region as their territory and they don’t like us encroaching in it,” Tempest suggested.

The Storm King groaned. “I hate necromancers. They send their minions to do all the work and remain hidden, and they can simply make new ones to replace the ones killed. For all I know, this one could be all the way in the jungle.”

“This is the most likely place for them to hide.”

“Well, if this necromancer wants war, they shall have it, even if I have to burn the whole jungle to find them,” the Storm King said before he looked at the storm creatures that followed him from his flagship. “Search if there is any skeleton bird around!”

The creatures immediately spread in the two ships to look at the sky. Rapidly, one of the creatures shouted, “I see one!”

The Storm King went to him, and the creature pointed with his finger. The Storm King followed the direction and saw the bird.

He glared at it. The necromancer was certainly looking at him through its eyes.

“You wanted my attention, you now have it, and this is not a good thing.”

…

“Then come to the jungle,” the bird replied in a childish girlish voice before it flew away.

The Storm King and Tempest watched the bird disappear in the sky, then the mare said, “It’s a trap.”

“Obviously,” the Storm King replied. “This necromancer certainly has an ambush prepared. And if she is confident enough to bring me there after observing me for weeks, then she must have prepared a worthy army made of whatever she could find. But I must still go there to deal with her. First of all, I need to find a way to deal with those birds. Also, we will need blunt weapons, they work better against skeletons.”

Tempest agreed with a nod. “An area attack spell would work well against the birds to deal with many of them at once. Do you think that your staff can do it?”

“With its current power, it can shoot electricity which can spread from target to target, but I don’t think that it would be very effective against skeletons. They need to be blown to pieces.”

“Then we would need your staff to create large explosions.”

“And for that, it needs to absorb magic.”

Tempest hesitated at that. “Then… absorb mine. My magic will be useless in this battle anyway, with my horn broken. You will make better use of it.”

The Storm King laughed. “Oooh! Teamwork! I’m sure this necromancer won’t be expecting that.”

“But once this battle is over, could you give it back to me?”

“Of course. Your magic is part of your charm. Now…” The Storm King raised his staff. “Don’t move. It will be over quickly.”

“He is taking a while to come,” Twilight said as she looked through the eyes of one of her birds keeping watch in the sky above the desert near the jungle. Twilight herself was in her lair, in the guard room, surrounded by Death Speaker, Goldie, and five pony guards (including three earth ponies and two unicorns).

“The Storm King isn’t stupid. He knows that you have prepared an ambush. He must be preparing his armada to counter whatever you will send,” Death Speaker said.

“I don’t know what he is expecting, but I don’t think that he will be prepared enough to fight a dragon,” Goldie said with amusement.

Death Speaker snorted. “Nobody expects a dragon. Like I said, rare are the necromancers who can animate one. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he has one or two cards up his sleeves too, so remain careful.”

Twilight nodded as she continued to watch through the eyes of her bird.

Then, on the horizon, she saw a storm appear and approaching very rapidly. The black clouds were immense, and she could see lightning flashing inside them, followed by deafening cracks of thunder. Each time that lightning flashed, she could see the silhouettes of many airships among the clouds.

She wanted to gulp. The Storm King knew how to make an impression.

“He is coming…” she said out loud to warn Death Speaker and Goldie before she focused on Star Eyes. Be prepared! The Storm King is approaching!

Yes, Princess! The troops are ready!

Twilight made her bird retreat into the jungle, and if she still had a heart, it would be racing.

Before long, the storm reached the jungle.

Immediately, thousands of skeleton birds of all kinds rose from the jungle, flying toward the storm.

And so, the battle for the fate of Equestria, and maybe even the whole world, started.

Countless cannons fired at the birds from inside the storm, the cannonballs killing many birds. But against thousands of birds, it barely mattered, and before long, Twilight could see the airships through the eyes of one of them.

On the biggest airship at the front, she could see the Storm King who was now in full body black armor and who had his staff raised. Then, he fired something from it.

The next instant, Twilight lost connection with her bird as a big explosion resounded. She felt over one hundred links disappear just like that. Then, there was another explosion, and another hundred links disappeared, followed by another, and another, and another.

Still, the birds were able to reach the airships and began to attack the crews, even entering inside the airships to take care of the creatures who thought that they would be safe surrounded by walls. However, the storm creatures were better prepared, now armed with giant clubs, and they were easily able to kill her birds. The number still overwhelmed many of them, but that number was quickly diminishing. And because of his full body armor, the birds could do nothing to the Storm King himself.

With the crews busy against the birds, the second wave of undead appeared: the pegasi and griffins. Also, the ballistas and cannons began to fire from little wood towers that she built for them all over the jungle. The airships were too high however to be reached by the catapults.

The Storm Army saw her flying undead approaching and immediately began to fire at them, the Storm King using his staff again to create huge explosions. With many of the crews busy with the birds, however, there weren’t as many cannons firing as before, allowing many of the pegasi and griffins to approach. Then, instead of attacking the crews, they began to attack the airships themselves, targeting the propellers and balloons.

Then, Sunny came in from further away where she wouldn’t have risked being discovered, clearly taking the Storm Army by surprise. Twilight even heard one of the creatures yell, “She has a dragon?!”

Because of their surprise, it took a while before the cannons began to fire at her, allowing her to get close enough that she opened her mouth and breathed fire at one of the airships.

Now, a skeleton dragon didn’t have the organs necessary to breathe fire. Thankfully, magic took care of that, so instead of breathing normal fire, Sunny was breathing magic fire which worked just as well.

As a result, the airship was engulfed in flames and dropped into the jungles.

Twilight tried not to think of what happened to the crew.

A problem quickly revealed itself however with Sunny. Dragons were known to be very tanky… thanks to their scales… which Sunny didn’t have anymore. As a result, Sunny’s bones were being destroyed one by one by the cannonballs, and she did her best to dodge them when they targeted her skull and spine, without forgetting her wings. Thankfully, cannonballs passed between her bones most of the time.

Soon enough, a second airship dropped on fire.

The airships attacked by Sunny weren’t the only ones dropping to the jungle. Thanks to the pegasi, one by one, airships were losing their means of staying in the sky, causing them to crash into the jungle in absolute chaos. Even the Storm King’s huge flagship crashed in a spectacular way.

And so started the second phase of the battle: taking care of the crews that survived the crashes.

As soon as the first airships crashed, Star Eyes sent the ground undead to attack the wrecks.

However, when Star Eyes herself went to attack the flagship, she got a nasty surprise: the Storm King and his new second in command were nowhere to be seen.

She cursed.

“Spread everywhere and search for the Storm King!” she ordered, and the undead under her obeyed. Princess! The Storm King is gone! We have no idea where he may be!

Twilight, hearing that, panicked and spread the news to her other undead, making half of them scatter all over the jungle while the other half fought the remaining forces of the Storm King, and a lot of them remained!

She saw Sunny’s state after she burned down at least a dozen airships and she ordered her to retreat. She didn’t want to lose her.

Also, the majority of her siege weapons were destroyed by now, taken down by the remaining airships’ cannons as they started firing all over the jungle in the hope of blowing up some undead. Soon enough, between that and the burning wrecks, the jungle was on fire in many places.

Dealing with the storm creatures was even harder than Twilight had expected. Many of them remained in the wrecks, using the cannons that survived the crashes to fire at the undead that showed themselves through the trees. Then, when undead reached the wrecks and fought the creatures, these hulking armored beasts showed their power, smashing undead left and right with their giant clubs. The smaller undead tried to overwhelm them, biting them to death all over their bodies where it wasn’t armored, and while many of the creatures fell this way, they still managed to kill many undead, lowering their number more and more until the remaining creatures could better defend themselves.

Even her pony undead had to work in number to take down just one storm creature. Twilight really did well to take time to gather that many undead.

As the battle continued, the Storm King’s feared armada was left in ruin, no airship remaining in the sky, but she lost thousands of undead, at least half of her army, and the battle was still going on as the storm creatures continued to fight.

Twilight even felt several soul pieces returning to her. These ones made her want to cry. Each undead with a soul piece became a close friend.

And all this time, the undead found the Storm King nowhere, and Twilight was starting to consider that he may have escaped.

But then, the doors to the guard room were kicked open, and there was the Storm King and Tempest Shadow, as well as a little hedgehog-like creature that Twilight heard was named Grubber who became Tempest’s sidekick. Right now, the little creature was cowering behind the mare who was holding a club in her mouth.

She could almost see the grin under the Storm King’s helmet as he said, “Found youuu~!”

Author's Note

Cliffhanger! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

Chapter 15

Twilight looked in horror at the towering figure of the Storm King who was now before her.

He was so tall, he could be even taller than Celestia herself. And with his black armor entirely covering him, only letting out his tail, he looked so scary. His helmet was like the ones the storm creatures were wearing, except that the eyes were sparkling blue with electricity, and it had the same black horn-things and blue symbol as the crown he usually wore, which was the same symbol as on his breastplate. Also, he had a cape made of storm clouds which were also flashing with lightning!

In his left hand, he had the Staff of Sacanas, and in his right hand, he had a club, like the creatures obeying him. Actually, his club was even bigger than the ones that the storm creatures were using, and it had spikes!

At his side, Tempest was also in black armor, but she didn’t have a helmet, leaving her head exposed, resulting in her having gotten some scratches from the birds. Grubber looked barely better.

“How…?” Twilight asked.

How did the Storm King find her lair?

The Storm King immediately looked at her, and while she couldn’t see his expression through his helmet, it seemed like he was a bit surprised.

“That voice. Are you…? Oooh! A lich? Now that’s something I never expected to fight! One hasn’t been reported since at least two centuries ago, at the other side of the world! Mmh… and I don’t see any jewels on you. Looks like you are smart enough to hide your phylactery, which couldl be… annoying.”

“T-that’s right! I hid my phylactery somewhere you will never find, so you can’t kill me! So you should as well give up now!” Twilight said. “And… How did you find my lair?”

“Easy,” the Storm King answered before he showed his staff. “A simple underground scan spell. I guessed that your lair was underground, better hidden this way, so I moved around in the jungle casting the spell every few hundred meters until I found something that looked like it may be the jackpot, and tadaa!”

“Oh…”

“As for me not being able to kill you…” He made little circles with his staff. “A little mind control spell to force you to guide me to your phylactery should do it. No, wait, let’s make it better and force you into servitude. An undead army would be very nice to replace all that I have lost today. Especially with a lich as powerful as you, as your dragon proved. So, your choice: follow me willingly, or unwillingly.”

Death Speaker then walked in front of Twilight. “I will not allow you to-”

The Storm King suddenly hit him from the side with his club, sending him crashing into a wall with several holes and broken ribs.

“Out of my way, you old fart!”

“Master Speaker!”

The Storm King then advanced toward Twilight, and the filly yelled, “Attack!”

Immediately, her five skeleton guards attacked the Storm King who laughed.

“Remain out of this, Tempest, I will deal with them myself,” he said before, with a swing of his club, he smashed a skeleton to pieces despite its armor.

The other four all managed to land a hit on the Storm King only for their swords to bounce off the armor.

Again, the Storm King laughed, then swung his staff and his club. The staff sent one of the skeletons flying while the club crushed another’s skull. The Storm King then fired a beam from the staff at the skeleton he sent flying, and the beam created an explosion on contact that blew up the skeleton.

Twilight fired a beam, hitting the Storm King right on the heart, actually making him step back.

He put a hand on his chest, where he was hit, and the metal there was very hot, almost melted.

“Mph. I felt it. Not bad. I guess you aren’t just good at sending your minions.”

As he talked, the two remaining skeletons, which were the unicorns, hit him again with their swords only for them to bounce off again. The Storm King charged toward one of the unicorns and readied his club only for it to be enveloped in a magical aura, stopping it right there.

As the Storm King struggled with Twilight to regain control of the club, the unicorn he had been about to attack gave up with the sword and fired instead a beam. However, while it impacted the armor, it barely did anything. The Storm King then raised his foot and stomped on the skeleton, crushing it. At the same time, the second unicorn fired a beam that hit him on the helmet, making his head bounce. The Storm King released the club which remained floating in the air, then charged toward the remaining unicorn and grabbed its skull before crushing it in his hand.

Then, he raised his hand behind him and caught the club mid-swing, not without some difficulty, and his hand ended up getting impaled by one of the spikes. He didn’t mind it, but then, he was hit by another beam from Twilight, right on the heart again, melting the same area of his armor as earlier a bit more.

In return, the Storm King fired his own beam from his staff, and Twilight leapt to avoid it. This beam revealed to not explode, so it would have only caused her to be sent flying, but still.

However, it allowed the Storm King to grab the floating club and to regain control of it, again not minding that his hand was hurt. Then, he used the staff’s power to cover himself in electricity, making lightning course his armor, and storm clouds appeared around him, which made him look even more impressive and intimidating.

Now, all of the Storm King’s focus was on Twilight.

For the first time in a while, as she levitated the dead guards’ five swords around her, Twilight wanted her mommy.

“Still not giving up?” the Storm King asked.

“No way!”

“Alright. Have it your way.”

Then the Storm King charged toward the filly and readied the staff. As he swung, Twilight parried it with one of the swords.

She fired another beam on the Storm King’s heart, melting the armor a bit more.

The Storm King then kicked Twilight, sending her crashing on a wall.

The unicorn quickly recovered and fired another beam at the Storm King’s heart, melting the armor again.

The Storm King looked down at the melted area and put a finger in it, the finger sinking through it until it touched his chest.

“I see what you are doing. Softening my armor so you can pierce me with one of these swords. Smart. You know what? Let’s give up forcing you into servitude. I will just destroy your body.”

At that, the Storm King fired from the staff a stream of very hot flames at Twilight. Hot enough to only leave ashes out of her bones.

With an “Eep!” the filly ran away.

The Storm King laughed. “Liches can rebuild their bodies as long as they have a phylactery. However, if the body is too damaged, it can no longer be used, and the lich remains stuck in their phylactery. A fate worse than death, in my opinion. And now, this will be your fate!”

While the Storm King gloated, Goldie, who had kept an eye on the situation, saw his opening. Then, he tore the Staff of Sacanas off of the tyrant’s hand, totally taking him by surprise as the staff was sent crashing against a wall.

Immediately, the storm clouds surrounding the Storm King, the lightning coursing his armor, the sparking eyes, and the cloud cape disappeared.

“What the-?! Oh…” He groaned. “Of course you have a ghost with you!”

Then, he was forced to defend himself as Twilight tried to pierce his heart with her five swords, having to parry them with his club.

Meanwhile, seeing her boss in difficulty, Tempest ran toward the staff only to be tackled by Death Speaker.

As she struggled against me, she yelled, “Get off me!”

However, they forgot Grubber who was able to reach the staff and grab it.

“Ah, Grubber. For once, you make yourself useful. Now, throw the staff at me!” the Storm King ordered.

Grubber did so immediately.

Only for the staff to be surrounded by a magical aura, and suddenly, it floated toward Twilight who grabbed it in her hooves.

Seeing red at Twilight daring to take his staff, the Storm King charged toward Twilight, raising his club.

Seeing him approach, Twilight panicked. She didn’t have time to get her swords in position to defend her.

So she pointed the staff toward the approaching Storm King at the last moment.

The next instant, the Storm King impaled himself on the staff, right in the heart.

The Storm King stopped right there, right before Twilight, club raised. Slowly, he looked down at his chest.

Twilight also starred in shock and horror. It had been her plan, and yet, she hadn’t been prepared for that.

She removed the staff from the Storm King’s chest.

The Storm King put a hand on his heart.

Everything was silent for a moment.

Then, the Storm King growled, then roared in rage, before he brought down his club on Twilight.

Only for Death Speaker to fire a beam of his own from his own staff, hitting the Storm King on the back of the head. While it hit the helmet, it still knocked his head forward, causing him to lose balance.

Twilight quickly jumped to her left before the Storm King could fall on her.

He dropped hard on the floor, releasing his club.

Then, he stopped moving.

Several seconds of silence later, Twilight heard him expire.

And to prove that he was really dead, she saw his ghost rise out of his body. The ghost still had the armor, but as he looked down at his body, Twilight could guess that he was very upset, his fists clenching.

Then, he sighed, said, “Well played. See you in the next life,” and walked with a goodbye wave of his hand before he faded away in a flash of light.

Another moment of silence followed before Twilight dropped on her butt, not believing what she did. She even dropped the bloody staff.

Then there was a roar followed by “NononoNONOOO!!!” and everyone looked at Tempest who stomped on the floor in rage. “He was supposed to repair my horn! Now, I will remain broken!”

The poor mare seemed ready to cry.

Death Speaker, who was holding his injured side, huffed. “You believed him? He was using you. He would have never repaired your horn.”

Tempest glared at him. “What do you know?!”

“Enough about the Storm King’s reputation to know that he had absolutely no honor. He probably did every single dirty trick in the book. Keeping a promise? He was above that.”

Tempest stomped her hoof again. “I refuse to believe you!”

“Is it so hard to accept that you were used? That you sold your home country for nothing?”

“YES!” Tempest almost roared before she broke down into sobs. “Since I lost my horn and became scarred, other ponies got scared of me and abandoned me. I lost control of my magic and became a broken mess. When the Storm King told me that he could restore my horn, I thought that I would be whole again, even if it meant that my kind would be enslaved. They would deserve that for abandoning me. But… If what you say is true, then… It was all meaningless, and I am hopeless.”

While still looking at the Storm King’s corpse, Twilight listened to all that. Looking away from the corpse, she walked toward Tempest and put a hoof on her side.

“I’m broken and alone too. Well, almost alone. And I wouldn’t mind being your friend.”

Tempest Shadow looked at the filly in shock.

“Aren’t liches supposed to be evil overlords? Why would you want to be my friend?”

“I’m not a normal lich. I don’t want to conquer anything. I… I just want to not be alone… And… Maybe I could help, for your horn?”

“How?”

“I don’t know yet, but I may be able to find something. I… will not make it a promise, but I can at least try.”

Tempest stared at Twilight, then sighed. “I have nothing to lose… Very well.”

Twilight immediately hugged the mare, surprising her. “My name is Twilight Sparkle!”

“...Tempe…” the mare began before she hesitated and sighed. “Fizzlepop Berrytwist.”

“That’s your real name? I like it better than Tempest Shadow.”

Again, Fizzlepop hesitated before she gave a small smile. “Thank you.”

“Uh… What about me?” they suddenly heard, and everyone looked at Grubber who was fiddling with his fingers. “Now that the Storm King is dead, I…”

Twilight giggled. “Yes, you can be my friend too.”

At that, Grubber smiled at the filly.

She then heard Death Speaker clear his throat. “That’s all nice and good but… I need to see a doctor.”

Twilight gasped, then looked over her mentor. “Are you alright?”

“I lost a lot of blood and I have several ribs broken, what do you think?” the minotaur deadpanned.

“Let’s bring you to Klugetown quickly!”

At that, Twilight called one of her surviving pegasi. Then, she walked toward the body of the Storm King and reanimated it.

“Transport Master Speaker outside of the lair. Gently!”

Without a word, the reanimated body walked toward Death Speaker and carefully lifted him, bride style, before walking out of the lair where the pegasus was waiting. Following Twilight’s orders in its mind, the satyr placed Death Speaker on the pegasus’ back, and the pegasus flew toward Klugetown with its charge.

Once the pegasus was gone, Twilight turned to other urgent matters. Mainly, the battle that was still going on in the jungle. It was slowly ending. Most of the Storm King’s forces were dead, but many of her undead were dead too. Now that the Storm King was dead, she should find a way to end it without more bloodshed.

So she ordered the body of the Storm King to go and tell the storm creatures to stop fighting. Twilight herself ordered her undead to step back.

Then she saw that the jungle was burning very badly, and she wondered how to stop that. Then she remembered the staff that could control the weather and went to grab it before she used it to create a storm above the jungle, making it rain and stopping the fires.

Twilight sighed in relief. It was over.

She found herself hugged by Goldie. “You won!”

Twilight felt like smiling, if tiredly, and hugged him back. “Yes, we won.”

Fizzlepop then said, “There is my magic inside the staff. Can you give it back to me?”

“Oh, really? Of course! Uh… And Master Speaker will need money to pay the doctor. Let’s see how much he has left and if I need to go sell an undead.”

Chapter 16

Riding a pegasus, Twilight reached Klugetown in just a few hours, the Staff of Sacanas and a large bag of money floating beside her with her magic. When she landed, the klugetowners immediately took interest in her, probably remembering her as “that undead filly who followed Death Speaker a couple of years ago and that everyone tried to get”. They probably still thought that she was one of his undead. And now, here she was, and with a bag of money. She kept the Staff of Sacanas close to her, ready to use it to defend herself.

She asked around a bit, found the hospital, and entered it, leaving her pegasus outside, beside the one that transported Death Speaker.

Inside the hospital, as soon as she entered, everyone present, patients and staff, looked at her only to quickly return to whatever they were doing. She went to the receptionist and dropped the bag of money on her desk.

“This is to pay for Death Speaker’s healing. I don’t know if it is enough.”

The receptionist looked into the bag and said, “It looks like it should be more than enough.” She then looked back at Twilight. “Mister Speaker is currently in surgery.”

“Ok. Thanks. I will return tomorrow. Oh, by the way, I killed the Storm King. Klugetown is free.”

All activity in the room stopped as everyone who was present looked at her in shock.

“Is it true?” one guy asked.

“Yup,” Twilight answered before she showed the Staff of Sacanas, still bloody at its extremity. “That’s his staff.”

Everyone looked at the staff in awe.

“Is this why Mister Speaker is injured?” the receptionist asked.

“Uhuh. He took a really bad hit, but he saved me.”

“Wait… Aren’t you one of Speaker’s undead? Why did he save you?” a nurse asked.

Twilight opened her mouth to answer, only to close it. If she revealed that she was Death Speaker’s apprentice instead of his undead, they would understand that she was a lich, and she wasn’t sure how they would react. They accepted necromancers, but liches?

“Uh… He cares about me,” she eventually answered.

Someone snorted. “That old fool would never care for his undead. He wouldn’t care for anybody. He only cares about himself.”

This made Twilight angry. “Master Speaker really cares about me! He took me in when I was all alone! He is teaching me about necromancy! And magic! And potions! And how to fight! He got between me and the Storm King to protect me, almost getting himself killed! He may be grumpy, and a bit mean sometimes, but there is no way he doesn’t care about me!”

By the end of her rant, everyone was staring at her in shock again.

“He took you in?” the receptionist asked. “You aren’t one of his undead?”

What Twilight said caught up to her, and she winced. Horseapple!

There was a few seconds of silence, then someone shouted, “A lich!”

Reactions were then very mixed. Some got scared of her and ran away, others looked at her as if she was a gold mine, and others just shrugged and did nothing.

That… was actually better than what she expected.

She carefully looked at the ones who seemed ready to jump on her as she said, “Don’t worry, I’m not one of these lich overlords. I don’t intend to conquer Klugetown. However, if you attack me, I have an army of undead ready to be called to defend me. Just warning the ones looking at me weirdly.”

One of the guys staring at her raised his hands defensively. “Hey, hey. Nobody would be crazy enough to attack the one who killed the Storm King. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“Good!”

The receptionist, who was now sweating, then returned the money bag, which was now just three fourth its original size. “Here’s the money not needed to pay for Mister Speaker’s healing plus a fifty percent reduction for freeing us from the Storm King plus another forty percent to convince you to please not attack us.”

Twilight wanted to frown.

“I can accept the fifty percent for freeing the town, but not the forty percent. It is not needed. I will not attack you unless you attack me first. So take back the money. If you want to please me, then do it.”

The receptionist laughed sheepishly as she took back the bag. “V-very well.” Then she counted the money and took the forty percent before giving the bag back.

“Thank you,” Twilight said as she took the bag.

And with that, she left the hospital.

Outside, what happened in the hospital repeated, people running away or simply looking at her in fear, others looking at her clearly wanting to add her to their collection, and others just accepting her. Without a word, she climbed on her pegasus and ordered it to fly back to the jungle.

Back at the jungle, she finally had time to look at the aftermath of the battle, and it didn’t look good.

The jungle was a mess. Devastation was everywhere. Many trees had been burned, and others destroyed. There were shipwrecks everywhere, especially the Storm King’s flagship which could be seen from very far, and there was absolutely no sound, which wasn’t normal in a jungle. There was always the sound of a bird squawking or of something roaring. Not anymore. All animal presence had disappeared, having escaped to other places in the jungle away from the battle, or having become collateral damage.

She knew that defending Equestria was worth it, but she still would have lowered her ears if she still had them.

Then, she found the Storm King, in front of the surviving storm creatures who were bowing, surrounded by her undead, including Star Eyes and Sunny. Goldie was also there.

There weren’t many of them left, not even one hundred. And now that they saw that the Storm King was dead and now one of her minions who told them to give up, they were waiting for her to decide their fate.

So she made her pegasus land beside the Storm King and descended before she faced the storm creatures.

Then, she said, “Go! Leave this place! Settle in Klugetown, move to some country, or return wherever you come from, I don’t care! Just make sure that I don’t find you causing problems again, understood?”

The storm creatures bowed in thanks, their heads touching the ground, before they ran away, the undead letting them pass.

Then Twilight looked at the Storm King.

The person she killed herself. It may have been for a good cause, to protect Equestria, it may have been in a war, it may have been in self-defense, he may have been absolutely evil and probably deserved what happened to him, but the fact was, she killed.

She quickly looked away, stopping thinking about it, and she began the task of reanimating whatever could be reanimated. Sadly, a good number of her undead who had been killed were now too damaged to be able to be reanimated, especially if their skull was destroyed. Many undead still ended up with some bones missing, and it wasn’t rare that Twilight had to use the bones of undead that couldn’t be reanimated to replace the missing ones. However, there were no spare bones to replace the ones Sunny lost.

Then dead storm creatures were brought to her.

Creatures that her undead killed, under her orders. She was pretty much the one who killed them.

Silently, she reanimated them, making them replace the undead she lost.

Once she was done, she returned to the lair, then went to Death Speaker’s bedroom where she climbed on his bed and curled up.

Goldie followed her on the bed, then spread his forelegs apart.

Immediately, Twilight hugged him, and he began to pat her spine.

“You did what you had to. You saved Equestria,” he said.

“I… I know… Still… How were you able to kill somebody without feeling horrible?”

Goldie remained silent for a bit, then said, “You really don’t mind killing somebody when you have been killed yourself.”

Twilight gasped, then broke the hug and looked at Goldie. “You were killed?”

“Yeah… As you know, I don’t like talking about how I died, but… I guess that I can tell you, if it can help you.”

“What… happened?” Twilight hesitantly asked.

“...” He sighed. “I don’t know if you remember, but my real name is Golden Crown.”

Twilight nodded. “Yes, I remember. I actually wondered if you were the son of a noble, with a name like that.”

“Well, you were right. I’m the son of nobles. And not any noble. I am from the lineage of Princess Platinum herself, which Celestia adopted as her nieces and nephews. You may have heard of Prince Diamond Tooth. Well, I’m his great granduncle.”

Twilight looked at Goldie in awe. “So you are a prince?”

“That’s right! But I never really liked that title. I actually didn’t care about being a noble. Strutting around with my muzzle in the air, being all proper, talking about politics and laws, eating food more sized for mice…” He shuddered. “That wasn’t for me. No, my dream was to join the Royal Guard and become a hero. To protect Celestia-even if she doesn’t really need protection, to protect the innocents, to fight for justice and peace… And my parents hated that. A noble has no business with a sword they would say.” he rolled his eyes. “They clearly forgot that, back in the days, nobles were an important part of the army. Celestia herself, who is a noble, fights on a regular basis whenever a bad guy shows up. I had totally my place in the army. and maybe I could have even become Captain!”

“Uh… Except that Captain deals with politics, which you wanted to avoid.”

Goldie groaned. “Right… Anyway, so I wanted to join the Royal Guards, and I did stuff that no nobles should do, like exploring the streets, playing in the mud, doing pranks, and so on, and my parents didn’t approve. They tried again and again and again to correct me, but I never listened. Then, one day, my mother got pregnant…”

Goldie looked away sadly. “Which was the perfect excuse for my father to… to remove me.”

Twilight gasped, putting her hooves on her mouth. “You mean…?”

Goldie nodded. “They poisoned me. They made it look like I became sick, and they made sure to choose a poison that wouldn’t be detected. Day after day, for weeks, I was unknowingly fed something that killed me little by little. I couldn’t leave the bed, I vomited half the things I ate when I wasn’t vomiting blood, I lost a lot of weight, my whole body hurt more and more, it became hard to breathe, I peed and pooped on myself, I even lost my sight… And then I closed my eyes only to never open them again. The only reason I knew that I was being poisoned was because my father told me just a few days before I died, but by then, I was too weak to do anything about it. He sounded so happy to see me die…”

Goldie was shaking by now, so Twilight hugged him again, and he returned it.

“I was so angry. My own parents… They were stealing my future. They would get away with it. Nopony would ever know about what really happened to me. And there was nothing I could do. I died, and all I wanted was to make them pay. To give them justice. So when I became a ghost, once I got enough energy, I began to prank them, a lot. I made their life into Tartarus. They quickly understood that I was the responsible, but instead of revealing anything, they fought me back, hiring mediums to force me out, but I would always come back and restart. But no matter how bad it was getting, no matter how much they lost their sanity, they never broke, they never revealed what they did, and they never got justice. They both ended up dying of a heart attack, first my father, then my mother, but not before they turned my little brother into a mini them.”

Goldie broke the hug and looked Twilight intently in the eyes. “After their death without them receiving justice, I lost my purpose. I tried to rest in peace, but I couldn’t. So I promised myself to become the hero that I dreamed to be. I would help the ponies in need, and if I ever met other villains like my parents, I would bring justice to them myself, one way or another. When I killed that Derek guy… I had prepared myself for such a moment for a while, and this poor mare… She was like me, being killed little by little, without being able to do anything about it. Because of that, I couldn’t help but imagine my father in Derek’s place. So when I killed him… I just couldn’t feel any guilt. So you understand now…”

He growled. “If you hadn’t killed the Storm King and all these storm creatures, everypony in Equestria would have become other Goldies. Maybe even everyone in the whole world. So… Even if killing is horrible, tell yourself that you saved countless beings from ending like me. You are a hero.”

Twilight wanted to cry, then she hugged Goldie again. “Thank you.”

Goldie smiled. “You’re welcome, Princess.”

“You are a hero too. You are my hero. Despite what I became, you became my friend. You remained at my side when I would have been all alone. You got me away from Canterlot. And you took the Staff of Sacanas away from the Storm King’s hand, which helped a lot. I don’t know what I would have become without you,” Twilight said before she moved to lie against the colt’s side. “Thank you so much.”

Goldie put a leg around her, holding her against him, not saying anything.

“Goldie? I promise. One day, I will find a way for you to rest in peace.”

The ghost eyed Twilight. “It would mean leaving your side.”

“Do you want to remain stuck forever with me? To never find peace?”

“...I don’t know. I admit, I wish to see what awaits me in the Great Golden Plains. Maybe I would end up reincarnating, getting a second chance at life, with a better family. But… I like being with you.”

“I don’t want to hold you back.”

“Then… I guess that we will see if you find a way to send me to the afterlife.”

“Wouldn’t telling the ponies the truth be enough?”

“I don’t know. I actually wanted my parents to be the ones to tell the truth. To show their true nature. And since they died, it became impossible.”

“Then I guess that I will see what I can do with the help of necromancy.”

“Yeah.”

From Goldie’s side, Twilight looked at him, then briefly placed her teeth against his cheek, surprising him. Then he looked at her.

“Was that a kiss?”

Twilight giggled. “The best that I could give with no lips, at least.”

The colt gave her a cheeky grin. “Seems like I’m not just your hero. I’m becoming your prince charming.”

Twilight giggled again before she placed her head against his shoulder. “Yeah, my prince.”

Goldie chuckled as he let his head rest against Twilight’s. “I guess it’s only right for a princess.”

“I’m only a princess because you call me that.”

“That's good enough for me. Besides, you are pretty much the Princess of the Dead.”

Twilight snorted. “No way.”

“After what you did, I think that you deserve this title. Also, all your undead call you Princess.”

“That’s your fault!”

“You are the one who told them to call you that instead of Mistress.”

“I prefer it to Mistress, and they don’t want to simply call me Twilight.”

“There you go then, Princess.”

Twilight wanted to pout.

Then the two laughed.

Chapter 17

“So, what do you two want to do?” Twilight asked Fizzlepop and Grubber, the three sitting in Death Speaker’s living room. Fizzlepop and Grubber were on the couch while Twilight was on a chair. Fizzlepop wasn’t wearing her armor anymore. “If you want to remain here, I can dig new apartments for you two, which will take a few weeks to do. Until then, you could use Master Speaker’s apartment while he is in the hospital. Your apartments should be finished before he returns. But I would understand if you don’t want to remain here. An underground complex in the middle of a jungle, several days away from all civilizations unless you count flying, surrounded by dead creatures including your old comrades and even your old boss, it would be very difficult, I imagine.”

“Oh, I really wouldn’t mind living here,” Grubber said. “I can’t say no to a free home.”

Twilight nodded, then looked at Fizzlepop. “What about you?”

“I… guess that I should remain here, if you’re going to search for a way to repair my horn. I don’t feel ready to return to Equestria yet anyway, and I don’t know where else to go.”

“Great! It will be so nice to have living company beside Master Speaker! I’m going to start working on your apartments right away!”

“Is there anything we will have to do while we remain here?” Fizzlepop asked.

“Weeeell… Not really. I guess that you could laze around if this is what you want, but if you think of something that you would like to do like, I don’t know, becoming a smith like Gerard, then go on. I imagine that it would help pass time as there is not much to do here.”

Fizzlepop and Grubber both nodded before they began to think about what they could do.

“What positions are open?” the mare asked.

“Uh… Black-smith, I guess, even if now that the Storm King is dead, we won’t need as much stuff forged. Then… I guess that an assistant to help put the books back in their place would be nice. Yeah, we are big readers here. Sunshine, Master Speaker’s own undead and personal maid, is the one who usually ends up doing it when piles of them start accumulating. Speaking of maids, you could become one too if you want. Now that I think about it, putting books back in their places could be counted as part of the work of a maid. Ooor you could help mine ore for the smiths, we have a couple of mines out in the jungle, but I don’t think that you will like to do that. Or… You could join my army. I don’t plan on using it again, but if another villain shows up… But I don’t like the idea of sending my friends to risk their lives for me, especially after I lost some undead that I considered as friends against the Storm King even if they were basically part of me, but since you already served in one army, you already have the experience.”

“No thanks,” Grubber said. “I got enough of that for a lifetime under the Storm King.”

“After, those are the jobs disponible for the lair, but there are other things that you could do for your own personal enjoyment, like… carving wood. Since we are in a jungle, there is wood everywhere, so you could use it to carve objects that you could then use to… decorate your apartment or the lair, or to sell in Equestria or in Klugetown. I could even dig a workshop for you. Or instead of wood, you could use stone and sculpt statues, or clay and sculpt pots and jars. Or I could teach you how to make potions. We have a room for that and more than enough ingredients.”

The two thought for a bit before Fizzlepop said, “I will give it some thought.”

“As for me, I guess that I wouldn’t mind being a maid,” Grubber said. “I already have a lot of experience tidying up places. It’s pretty much what the Storm King made me do aboard the flagship for a while before he made me second in command, then Tempest’s second, and it had been an alright job.”

“Alright.”

“Uh… Will I have to wear a maid outfit?” Grubber then asked in worry.

Twilight imagined the little guy in a maid outfit, then held back a laugh. “Only if you want.”

“No thanks.”

“Ok. Then no maid outfit for you. But if you want a uniform… Well, we have nothing to make clothes, so something to think about later. Or I guess that you could commission something either in Klugetown or in Equestria. Well, I guess only in Klugetown. We don’t have any bits for Equestria. Mmh… Now that I think about it, I could make some undead start to produce objects out of wood, stone, clay, and iron, and also collect fruits in the jungle, and one of you could go to Equestria to sell all of that so we can start to get bits. Well, you said that you didn’t feel like returning to Equestria, Fizzlepop, so I guess that it would be you going there, Grubber.”

“But I would never be able to pull a cart full of all that all by myself. I would need a bigger creature, and if Fizzlepop doesn’t come, then it leaves only your undead.”

“Which would cause problems… Ok, getting bits will have to wait.”

“Wait, maybe you could send the Storm King? With his full body armor, nobody would see that he’s dead,” Grubber proposed.

“It wouldn’t work,” Fizzlepop rebutted. “Ponies are extremely skittish, and the Storm King in his armor doesn’t look friendly at all. They would avoid you.”

Grubber snapped his fingers. “Darn it!”

“I guess that I could return to Equestria briefly to help sell stuff,” the mare then said. “Although ponies also tend to avoid me… So I’m not sure how well this would go.”

“Well… At least, we can try. You wouldn’t need to go far. Just to the nearest town, which is Dodge City, at the other side of the Badlands,” Twilight said. “Since it’s a border town so close to the Badlands, they must be more used to people who… well… who look different.”

“That’s true.”

“But it won’t be anytime soon. For now, let’s focus on settling you.”

The Storm King and the storm creatures entered their rigor mortis phase, so Twilight decided to wait for it to end before she would decide if she would give the tyrant a piece of her soul or not. Frankly, she couldn’t see why not. He would be a big addition to her generals.

She sent her undead to loot the airships, as well as toward the Storm King’s island to loot his HQ. They quickly returned with more of this black armor, as well as various weapons, cannons, and many treasures that the Storm King had plundered all over the world when he conquered countries, including many magical items. Twilight suddenly found herself having to build a treasure room. She wasn’t sure of what she would do to all this however. Maybe she could give the magical items to her generals.

For the black armors, while she found herself with a lot of them, their number was still limited and she had no way to get more for now, so once Gerard worked on them to make them more fitting, she would give them to her elite troops. She already knew that the storm creatures will be included in them. They proved to be real juggernauts that she only managed to defeat thanks to overwhelming numbers (and a dragon and hydra, they worked very well). If another villain showed up, they won’t laugh for long when they will find themself facing these guys. And the Storm King would be commanding them. And she will also make some black armor for herself. She really needed protection.

As for what to do with the airships… She considered repairing them, but she decided against it. She wanted to remain hidden, and having airships flying above her lair wouldn’t help at all. In the end, she decided to leave them.

She kept the Staff of Sacanas. It offered a lot of potential.

She explained all that to Death Speaker in Klugetown’s hospital. The minotaur was on a bed, his chest entirely bandaged.

Once she finished talking, he nodded, then said, “Your victory made you much stronger. Finally, it is a good thing that the Storm King came.”

Twilight sighed. “I still would have rather avoided having to kill…”

“It was bound to happen sooner or later. I myself had to kill a couple of times. Don’t put too much thought into it. In this cruel world, what you did is considered as normal.”

“It isn’t normal in Equestria.”

“How many villains do you think Celestia has killed? How many soldiers do you think the army has killed through the wars that Equestria has been through?”

Twilight opened her mouth, then closed it. “....A lot.”

“And yet, nobody in Equestria bats an eye about it. Killing is as normal there as everywhere else. So nobody will hold it against you. On the contrary, they would thank you for getting them rid of the pain in the ass that the Storm King has been. You understand? You did nothing wrong. Remember that.”

Twilight silently nodded.

A moment of silence followed before Death Speaker said, “Once I get out of the hospital, we will go to Death Mountain.”

Twilight looked at him in surprise. “Already? Are you sure I’m ready?”

“That blow I took weakened me a lot. I don’t think that we have much time left. Try to learn as much as you can by yourself while I recover. And now that you have the Staff of Sacanas, maybe you will have less problems facing whatever will be inside the mountain.”

“Alright.”

A few days later, in the guard room, Twilight stared at the Storm King, now out of rigor mortis. She made him remove his armor so Gerard could repair the breastplate, so now, he had nothing on him.

The Storm King remained immobile, doing nothing.

Finally, Twilight began to work on giving him a piece of her soul. A few moments later, she was done, and she looked at the Storm King again, which she just named Storm, not knowing his real name.

Storm looked down at her, then grinned before he suddenly picked her up and put her on his head, much to her surprise. Then, Storm began to run around, making her squeal and laugh.

“How is your ride, Princess? Should I stop?”

“No! Continue! Faster!”

“As Her Majesty wishes!”

At that, Storm climbed the stairs and exited the lair with her, running into the jungle.

After a few minutes, still grinning, Storm asked, “So, is it a good enough impression after the very bad first one that my body made?”

“Yes! Yes!”

“Glad to hear! Still want to continue? I can do it all day and all night!”

“Yes!”

“Alright! I’m accelerating again! Brace yourself!”

And his speed practically doubled. He may be running even faster than a cheetah. And he expertly avoided all the trees in his path.

On his head, Twilight laughed like she hadn’t laughed since she became a lich.

Twilight studied hard by herself in Death Speaker’s absence. She still visited regularly to ask him questions about this or that that she read in the books. She wanted to be as prepared as possible for Death Mountain so she could get her hooves on the Staff of Thanatos and save her mentor.

Weeks passed, and Death Speaker was considered healed enough that he could leave the hospital despite his torso still being bandaged, however, he had difficulty walking without his staff. Twilight let him borrow her manticore as a mount.

As soon as he returned to the lair, Death Speaker prepared for the journey to Death Mountain.

Thankfully, they could simply fly there, Twilight on a pegasus, and Death Speaker on the manticore. It will still take several days, but it will be much faster than the weeks it would have taken on ground, passing by Equestria and going west beyond Las Pegasus.

Once Death Speaker was ready, they departed, just the two of them, a pegasus, a manticore, a vulture, and Goldie.

For days they flew, regularly taking rests so Death Speaker could eat and sleep.

Then, they finally saw Death Mountain on the horizon. It wasn’t the tallest mountain, nor the largest, but it had the particularity of being a lonely mountain in the middle of nowhere, and the closer they got, the more Twilight could see that there was absolutely no life around it, not even grass, clearly delimiting the death ward. The presence of many skeletons in a line around the mountain also helped.

They circled the mountain, making sure to never cross the line, until they found the entrance to Thanatos’ lair, two large stone doors with a giant skull sculpted on them. They then landed just a few meters in front of the death line before the doors.

“There it is. Thanatos’ lair,” Death Speaker said.

Twilight wanted to gulp. That was the kind of foreboding mountain where you would see vultures fly above in stories, except that, here, even the vultures died, their skeletons part of the line of skeletons surrounding the mountain. The mountain itself was made of black sharp stones, making her wonder if it was natural, with lots of skulls sculpted everywhere, and even some real skulls of giant creatures like dragons. Not a sound could be heard except a faint breeze blowing dust, and it was very cold. All it missed were black clouds covering the sun above it.

“Well… Here I go…” Twilight said.

Death Speaker gently placed a hand on her head. “Good luck, kiddo.”

Goldie rubbed his head against hers. “Remember, I will be with you.”

Twilight wanted to smile at him in thanks. Instead, she gave him a nod before she advanced toward the mountain, Goldie following her.

She crossed the death line, and before long, she was before the door.

Surprisingly, when she got close enough, the eyes of the skull glowed purple, and the doors opened by themselves, revealing a hallway where magical torches held by pony skeletons hanging on the walls lit up with purple flames.

The mountain itself let out a sound like a moan from its depth.

Twilight was now shaking, but after several seconds, she steeled herself and advanced. Once she was inside, the doors closed behind her.

Chapter 18

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.”

Chapter 19

Twilight was face to face with the Grim Reaper himself, and she had never been so scared before, not even when she fought the Storm King. However, she was also surprised when he called her by what Goldie named her some time ago. The colt placed himself between him and her, but she wasn’t sure that it would help a lot.

“Y-you know me?” she asked.

“I was told about you, and I expected you,” Thanatos answered. “Well, admittedly, you arrived here much sooner than I expected. I don’t know when you would have come, but I thought that you would have waited to reach your magical maturity to come here at least. Without that staff you got from the Storm King, you would have died. It’s a really powerful artifact that you got there. It may even become more powerful than my staff if given enough magic. You got really lucky, Princess.”

“Well, I… I had to get the staff to help Ma… Death Speaker… He would have died of old age if I had waited to reach my maturity,” Twilight said.

She was keeping her guard up, but so far, Thanatos didn’t seem willing to attack her. Maybe she will be able to get away without a fight.

“You should have let him die. That staff was destined to you, not to him,” the older lich said.

Twilight looked at him in shock. “What? It was for me?”

“Weren’t you feeling its call? This staff wanted you to have it. With it, you would have reached your full potential. But instead, you gave it to some stranger you naively trusted. Yes, he taught you a lot and allowed you to grow faster, but giving the staff to him was just pure foolishness. Be glad that he decided to spare you for some reason. In his place, I would have gotten rid of a potential rival. And now, you won’t be able to follow your destiny.”

“What destiny?” Goldie asked.

“This is not for me to tell. It wants to personally tell you,” Thanatos said.

“”It”?” both Twilight and Goldie questioned.

“However, it may not be over yet. You can recover the staff, with the help of this one that you have.” At that, Thanatos tilted his head. “How about we see how good you are?” Suddenly, he fired something from his horn, and the next instant, Goldie was enveloped in purple spectral chains.

“Hey!”

“By yourself.” Then, Thanatos began to self-levitate, floating higher and higher above the throne. “So fight me. Show me everything that you have learned until now.”

Twilight was starting to step back, descending the stairs. “Uh… Can I refuse?”

“No.”

Here goes leaving without a fight…

The scythe floated into Thanatos’ hooves, and he readied it.

Then, he charged toward her.

Screw what was said earlier. Being face to face with the Grim Reaper had been scary, but this? The Grim Reaper charging at you, scythe ready to reap your soul out of your body? Scariest thing ever!

With an “Eep!” she used the Staff of Sacanas to teleport, avoiding the attack just in time.

“Yes. Teleporting. Thanks to that, you were able to avoid the firewall. This is not something you should have been able to use before a while. Make sure to never get this staff out of your hooves,” Thanatos said as he turned to face where Twilight appeared, among the skeletons. Twilight's manticore then arrived to attack Thanatos, but he easily beheaded it.

The filly then used her staff to animate a group of skeletons around her.

“And animating so many skeletons at once… You would have been forced to wait to reach maturity to be able to do that. Too bad for you…”

Thanatos animated a group of skeletons around him, a little smaller than Twilight’s.

“I can do the same, and I don’t need a staff boosting me to do that, so I fear that this won’t help you. Also, there is something that I can do that you probably can’t do yet.”

“Uh… What is it?”

“Micromanaging your undead in the heat of the moment.”

“Oh…”

“Oh, I have no doubt that you can micromanage your undead… while calmly hidden in your lair. But once you find yourself in the frontline, it immediately becomes much harder to manage while defending yourself. You will have to adapt your mind to be able to multitask. Now, how about a little demonstration?”

Suddenly, Thanatos teleported just in front of Twilight and began to attack her forcing her to defend herself with shields while she countered with beams that the older lich blocked with his own shields, or simply by avoiding them. She tried to smash him on the head with her staff, but he parried with his weapon.

While the two fought, Thanatos’ undead were following mental instructions, allowing them to fight with more intelligence than usual. They used teamwork, targeted weaknesses, and used every advantage they had, allowing them to destroy Twilight’s undead very easily despite being slightly in numerical inferiority. Twilight tried to help them by giving her own instructions, but as soon as she lost focus on Thanatos, she almost found herself beheaded.

Because of that, Thanatos’ undead soon began to attack her, quickly surrounding her.

So she used her butterfly wings to fly, only to be followed by the undead that could fly, like the pegasi or the griffins, and undead like unicorns could simply fire at her from a distance. Still, it was more manageable, and she was able to destroy a few undead before Thanatos acted.

From his horn came a magical wave that went in every direction, quickly reaching Twilight and traversing her. As soon as the wave passed her, her butterfly wings disappeared.

“Wha-AAAAHHHH!!!”

As Twilight dropped right in the middle of the undead, Thanatos chuckled.

“The Dispel spell. Here is my advice: learn it as soon as you can. It will make your life much easier.”

Twilight surrounded herself with a shield to keep the undead away, then charged magic into her staff before she smashed it on the ground, sending a powerful magical shockwave that blew apart all of the undead surrounding her, including Thanatos himself, his bones scattering in a large area and his cloak of darkness disappearing.

A few seconds of silence followed before the black crystal in Thanatos’ necklace glowed. Then, his bones began to float and to reform his body. In a few seconds, he was back to normal, his cloak of darkness reappearing. He then picked up his necklace and put it back around his neck.

“Not bad. You got me there. But as you certainly know, as long as my phylactery remains intact, I will never die. Even if my bones are destroyed beyond use, I can just use new ones from the undead in this room, and as you can see, I won’t run out anytime soon. You should actually move your soul into a receptacle of its own as soon as you can. Your phylactery being your own body is a terrible disadvantage. If your skull is destroyed, it’s over. The Staff of Sacanas could be a very good phylactery for you.”

“I don’t know how to move my soul out of my body.”

“Yes, this is something that you have to learn first to become a lich, but since you became one in a very unusual way, then you will have to study it. If it can help, it’s very close to what you do when you move a piece of your soul into one of your undead. Now, let’s turn up the difficulty of this fight.”

The next instant, many bones began to levitate around Thanatos, and all of them pointed toward Twilight who wanted to gulp.

“Yes, you can do that. You never thought of it, did you?”

Twilight was sure that she would be blushing.

Thanatos then sent the bones toward Twilight, first one by one, then two by two, then more and more and more.

At first, Twilight used her staff to block them, then she used shields, but when more bones began coming, she started to run to avoid them. She used a spell to boost her own speed, then fired beams at Thanatos only for him to use bones as shields. Wanting to frown, Twilight looked around at the many skeletons and decided to try to copy her adversary. So she levitated bones that she sent toward him, forcing him to put more work into defending himself.

Until his own cloak of darkness grew tentacle-like tendrils that began to knock away the bones.

“What?!”

“This cloak isn’t just for decoration. It is my armor that I can control at will,” Thanatos explained. “Being liches, we have a close affinity to Darkness, which Death is part of its domain. It is a magic that is usually very difficult to learn. The only other practitioners I know are Luna thanks to her connection to the Night, the Pony of Shadow because he is literally made of darkness, and Sombra thanks to his Dark Magic. I guess that Celestia could use it, but she is more of a Light user. Maybe Starswirl could, but I never saw him use it.”

Done talking, Thanatos sent the tendrils to attack Twilight who quickly ran behind a pillar. The tendrils followed her, only to hit nothing once they reached behind the pillar.

Just as Thanatos understood that Twilight was gone from behind the pillar, the filly came out from behind another pillar, behind Thanatos, and fired a beam at him before returning behind the pillar. The beam hit Thanatos on the back of his skull, blowing a hole in it through the darkness of the cloak but not quite destroying it.

He chuckled. She was teleporting behind the pillars to surprise him. Smart.

“You are using the environment to your advantage. Good, good. But let’s see what you will do against THAT.”

Suddenly, darkness appeared and encompassed a large area around Thanatos. When Twilight saw that once she came out from behind another pillar, she was surprised, but she still fired a beam into the darkness, not sure if she hit anything.

Then, the darkness disappeared, revealing three Thanatos, looking exactly like each other.

“Try to find the real me,” the three said at the same time.

Twilight groaned.

The three fired at her, and she quickly ran behind the pillar to teleport to another pillar, far enough so Thanatos wouldn’t hear the pop! of when she reappeared. She then animated all the skeletons around the pillar before she sent them to attack the three Thanatos. She repeated it as she teleported from pillar to pillar, sending hundreds of undead at the older lich and his doubles.

After a while, she stopped to look at what was going on, hearing no sound of her undead being destroyed, and she saw that her undead were hitting… nothing. The attacks were going right through the three Thanatos.

The real Thanatos then came out of her own shadow and used her surprise to put his scythe around her neck.

“You lose.”

Twilight didn’t dare move, waiting for Thanatos to behead her. However, after a few seconds, Thanatos removed his scythe, leaving her head in its place.

“I won’t kill you. It was just a fight to see each others’ abilities, nothing more. And I must say, you fought well. You managed to get a few good hits on me. Of course, if I had had my staff, the fight would have been instantly over. Still, you must really make your father proud.”

Twilight so wanted to raise an eyebrow right now as she looked at Thanatos in incomprehension. “My father? He doesn’t even know where I am.”

Thanatos chuckled. “Not this father.”

“What?”

He didn’t say more as he began to walk toward his throne, Twilight hesitantly following him.

Once beside his throne, Thanatos removed the spectral chains from around Goldie, and immediately, the colt wrapped Twilight in a hug.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I wasn’t hurt.”

Thanatos stared at them for a moment before he looked away.

“As soon as it was discovered that my talent was necromancy, I was ostracized by the other ponies. From when I was your age, I had to learn to survive alone. Nopony would ever get close to me. Not even my own parents. This story is pretty much the story of every single necromancer in the world. The loneliness… makes us bitter, and one thing leading to another, we want to get back at the world for abandoning us. Ironically, as I surrounded myself with death, I grew to fear dying alone, so I worked hard to defeat Death, turning myself into a lich. However, before I would try to conquer Equestria like many others tried and failed before me, I worked on getting more power for myself. Thanks to a ritual that I made thanks to countless years of studying and planning, I was able to call Death itself.”

Twilight and Goldie gasped.

“Death? Death as in…”

“Yes. The force of nature itself. Ponies called me the God of Death, but if there was ever a real God of Death, then it would be it: Death itself. And I was able to talk to it thanks to that ritual.

Death… is a neutral force. It doesn’t interfere with the world, except to do its duty. It wasn’t angry at me for cheating it however. It was more… sad. Sad that I wouldn’t accept its embrace. That I would allow myself to remain stuck here in this cold facsimile of a life instead of joining the warmth that was promised to all souls passing on. But I didn’t care about what it was saying. Instead, I used the ritual to take part of its power and put it into an artifact that I made myself: my staff. Others call it the Staff of Thanatos. However, I call it the Staff of Death.”

Twilight looked at Thanatos in awe. “So the staff has the power of Death itself in it?”

“No wonder it’s so powerful,” Goldie said.

“But wait… It was calling me… Why…? What do I have to do with Death?” the filly questioned.

Thanatos chuckled. “You have a lot to do with Death. So, after I got the Staff of Death, I started my attempts to conquer Equestria, getting really close. The sisters had to work together to defeat me, and even then, they had to fight to their limits just to force me to retreat to do another attempt a few months later. And so I became the most feared lich of all time, killing countless ponies and other creatures to grow my army again and again.

However, I never managed to win, and I got very frustrated. Eventually, I found myself wanting to talk to Death again, to hear its gentle voice. And so I used the staff to talk to it again, without having to do a ritual this time. And we talked, and we talked, and we talked… Time passed, I attempted less and less to conquer Equestria, talking to Death instead. Eventually, I just stopped coming out of my lair to spend all my time talking to Death. It still tried to convince him to let it embrace me, but I remained stuck in my fear, and so it talked to me about what Death was. Why I didn’t have to fear it. Why it is part of the world. Why it is part of Harmony. From there, it talked about Harmony, about the other forces, about the world, the universe… But despite everything, I remained scared of dying alone. I wasn’t scared of dying. Just… of being alone. So I continued to spend time with Death, even when it ran out of things to say. Thanks to Death, I was never alone.

Then, Death told me of a plan it had. It would use its power to change the fate of a foal and… make it its. It needed to do that. It needed… an avatar. It needed… a child.”

Thanatos then looked at Twilight right in the eyes.

“You are this child. You are its daughter. You are the daughter of Death.”

Author's Note

Title drop.

Chapter 20

Twilight wasn’t sure if she heard it right.

“I… I’m… What…?”

“You are the daughter of Death itself. When I called you the Princess of the Dead earlier, it wasn’t just because your ghostly companion called you that once. You really are the Princess of the Dead.”

Twilight fell on her butt, her jaw hanging open.

“W… Bu… But… How…? My father is Night Light, a unicorn of Canterlot, Equestria, not… Death.”

“As you were forming in the womb of your mother, Death offered some of its power to you, changing you and turning you into a different pony than you would have become otherwise. While you remained physically the same, mentally and magically, you became more attuned to Death. This is where your fascination with death came from. This is why you became a lich that day. Death made you what you are. You are as much its daughter as you are the daughter of Twilight Velvet and Night Light.”

“The day I became… So it wasn’t an accident?”

“No. When you got your Cutie Mark, your magic fully merged with Death’s power within you and made you what you are now so your body wouldn’t reject it and truly kill you. Death’s power can’t be contained within a living body.”

“But… Why me?”

“You were apparently already destined to be a very powerful unicorn. Maybe even more. Death saw you as the perfect receptacle for its power.”

“Why… did he do this to me?”

“To get this answer, you will have to ask Death itself, once you recover the Staff of Death from your old mentor. It REALLY wants to talk to you.” The purple flames within Thanatos’ eye sockets did a roll at that. “It wouldn’t shut up about you. You befriending a ghost. When you animated your first undead. When you gave your first piece of soul. ESPECIALLY when you defeated the Storm King. Sometimes, I pondered getting out of my sleep-like state and resuming conquering Equestria just to get away from it.”

“Wait, you mean that Death is a doting father?” Goldie asked.

“The worst,” Thanatos answered in a very flat tone. “If it could, it would spoil you rotten. And then, it would present you to your uncles the other forces of nature and talk their ears off about how adorable and smart and powerful you are.”

Twilight couldn’t stop herself from letting out a giggle at that. Beside her, Goldie rolled in the air in laughter.

The filly quickly calmed down however as everything finally caught up.

She was the daughter of Death. The primordial force itself. It was the reason why she died. Why she had to leave behind everything she knew for a lonely life in the jungle with just the ghost of a heroic colt and an old grumpy minotaur. Well now, it was the ghost of a colt, a broken mare, and a hedgehog creature…

Unless they turned on her too…

Twilight shook her head, stopping thinking about that.

Death was responsible for everything that happened to her for the last two years. The bad, but also the good. Meeting Goldie. Learning so much. Stopping the Storm King. And she guessed that meeting Death Speaker also counted, even if it ended badly. She still ended up spending a lot of good time with him while it lasted.

She really didn’t know what to think. What was her destiny before Death altered it? What would have been her life? And what was her destiny now? Why did Death decide to have a child? It was probably a very important reason for a force of nature to do that when it wasn’t supposed to meddle with the world outside of its domain. What, was the balance between Life and Death going bonker? Whatever it was, it was a huge expectation on her small shoulders. Would it have been better if Death hadn’t touched her?

And really, the freaking daughter of Death! DEATH! What was there to say to that?

“Follow me,” Thanatos suddenly said, getting her out of her thoughts. She saw the older lich walk toward the back of the room, where she could see a door.

Not sure what more he could say, she followed him, Goldie alongside her.

Soon, they passed the door, and Twilight looked in awe.

Around her was a library, and a very large one at that, dwarfing the two libraries she had at her lair.

She recognized some of the books, especially Grogar’s, but the majority of these books were unknown to her.

“Death told me that you love books, so here is my whole collection. You can have it. I have no use for it anymore,” Thanatos said before he pointed at a chest. “In this chest are several artifacts that you could use to create your phylactery. Take them too.”

“Why not use a simple stone as my phylactery? It would be easier to hide.”

“This is a misconception. The receptacle of your soul must have magic in it. The more, the better, because magic boosts your soul’s own power, and most powerful artifacts are generally harder to destroy. Crystals work very well.”

“Then why not put your soul in your staff?”

“With Death’s power within it, I wasn’t sure of what would happen.”

Twilight nodded, then looked at the library.

“I’m not sure how I will be able to transport all that.”

“Use the pegasi and griffins in the other room, without forgetting your manticore. You can even use Leviathan. You should be able to reanimate him. You can make several trips.”

“Alright.”

“I’m not proposing to you that I become your new mentor. I don’t think that you are ready for another one after how it went with Death Speaker, and you have even less reasons to trust me with my past. Besides, Death Speaker was right about this point: you can perfectly teach yourself.”

Twilight agreed with a nod, then asked, “What will you do, then?”

“Now that I gave you everything, my job in this world is over. I can finally let Death do its job. I’m ready to greet it… well… like the friend that it became, I guess.”

Goldie grinned. “See? Necromancers can have friends, even if that friend is Death itself.”

“I guess that we are too used to everyone hating us to accept that,” Thanatos replied to that with a sigh before he returned to the throne room, Twilight following him again.

Thanatos went to his throne and sat on it before he removed his necklace from around his neck.

Twilight jumped on his lap and snuggled against his ribs.

“You are scared of dying alone, then I will remain with you to the end,” she said.

For the first time since forever, Thanatos wanted to smile. Instead, he petted the filly.

“I hope that you will make many friends,” he then said before he pointed his horn at the black crystal in the necklace and charged magic.

“Goodbye,” Twilight said. “And thank you.”

“Goodbye, my great grandniece, and… use my body well.”

Finally, before Twilight could register what he said, he fired a beam powerful enough that it made the black crystal explode.

Immediately, Thanatos’ body slumped against the throne, his cloak of darkness disappearing, and the necklace dropped on the floor.

Like a mirage, Twilight saw Thanatos’ ghost appear before the throne. He now looked like a normal pony, allowing her to see that he had a coat blue like the night, a purple mane and tail with a black and pink stripe side by side in a style very similar to Twilight’s, but shorter, and pink eyes. Also, she finally was able to see his Cutie Mark: a skeleton with a heart wrapped in its forelegs.

Thanatos began to walk away, only for Twilight to extend a hoof toward him and to say, “Wait… Great granduncle?”

Thanatos stopped, then looked at Twilight with a loving smile.

“Remember my real name: Dusk Shine. Good luck, Twilight.”

Dusk Shine then closed his eyes and resumed walking away, eventually fading away in a flash of light.

Twilight lowered her leg, staring at where her uncle disappeared.

Goldie also had his jaw open. “The Grim Reaper… was your uncle? Woah… Seems like being powerful liches runs in the family. Maybe that’s another reason why Death chose you.”

“Maybe…” Twilight absentmindedly said before she finally looked away, then at Dusk’s body, which she was still on.

She animated it, then gave it a piece of her soul.

Dusk Shine looked down at his niece, then hugged her.

It wasn’t as good as if it had been the real deal, but Twilight forced herself to think that it was still him.

At least, she will be able to differentiate him from the other undead unicorns thanks to the hole in his skull that she made.

Days later, Twilight was back in her lair with several hundreds of pegasi and griffins plus Leviathan transporting books and magical artifacts, without forgetting her manticore that she reanimated so it could transport Dusk.

While the artifacts were placed in the treasure room, the books were placed in the storeroom while waiting to dig a library big enough.

Then, she plunged herself into her studies, trying to not think of everything that happened.

As she read book after book without stopping, Goldie looked at her in worry, especially after she refused to join him in an Ogres and Oubliettes game.

“Hey, uh… So, Death Speaker has been lying to us all this time, right?”

Twilight’s legs shook for a moment at that before they stilled.

“T-then I’m sure that he didn’t mean it when he said that Aunt Celestia was trying to trick you when she searched the jungle two years ago! I mean, why would she try to trick you, when she could have just done like the Storm King and used a scan spell to find the lair? I’m sure that she knows such a spell!”

Twilight was silent for a moment before she looked at Goldie and said, “I don’t know…”

“Come on, let’s give it a try. I’m sure that she will be able to help you, and contrary to Death Speaker, she isn’t the kind to betray.”

Twilight thought for a moment, then hesitantly nodded. “Okay… But… I don’t feel like going to Canterlot so… let’s make her come here, alright?”

“I guess that’s fair. Then tell Mickey to talk to her.”

“He never managed to enter the castle, and the guards and servants wouldn’t react well to a dead rodent.”

“Then send him to talk to your parents. I’m sure that they will know that he is yours, and they will lead him to Aunt Celestia.”

Talking to her parents? After two years… How will they react?

Despite the question, she nodded. “Yes. I will send him to my house. Thank you, Goldie.”

“You are welcome, Princess. Eh, you really are a princess.”

Twilight giggled. “Yeah, I am.”

Meanwhile, on Mt. Everhoof…

Death Speaker climbed the mountain, every obstacle being swiftly dealt with thanks to the Staff of Thanatos and with the help of some undead he got these last few days.

As he climbed, he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about Twilight. As much as he hated to admit, he grew fond of the little filly, and he really hesitated leaving her. However, he knew that she would have been against what he planned, so in the end, he decided that it was better for their paths to separate, even if it hurt (and rushing it didn’t help).

And hopefully, his betrayal will convince her to remain alone in her lair, away from everything that will happen.

Last time he watched through Sunshine’s eyes, the filly was deep in a book, seemingly closing herself into her studies. Good.

Eventually, Death Speaker reached the summit of the mountain, arriving before a cave. However, he didn’t advance further, knowing what blocked the cave. Raising a hand, he placed it on what revealed to be a magical barrier, very powerful. He immediately removed his hand, the barrier causing some pain in it.

But it won’t be enough to stop him.

Raising the staff, he accumulated magic into it, then unleashed it in the form of a black beam.

The barrier was immediately destroyed, leaving the path open for him to enter the cave.

A few moments later, he came out holding a bell.

“Now, it’s time for Minoria to pay, and eventually, the world. It’s time for the necromancers to rise.”

Yeah, Twilight really wouldn’t have approved… But the necromancers needed, deserved to come out of the shadows.

And then, he will be able to offer to her a world where she won’t be alone.

Chapter 21

Twilight Velvet and Night Light were having dinner together. Well, it was more breakfast for Night Light since he worked the night.

They… tried to live despite Twilight’s disappearance. They at least knew where she was, more or less. Shining told them about Celestia thinking that she was somewhere in the jungle south of Equestria, and they knew that she seemed alright thanks to the reports of undead activities several weeks ago, even if Twilight unearthing bodies out of their graves to seemingly constitute an army was worrying. Several times, they thought of leaving to search the jungle, but each time, Shining convinced them to not do that as it would be too dangerous. The jungle was filled with wild predators, and it would be very difficult to find Twilight in there. They had absolutely no experience exploring jungles, and they could easily get lost.

So they lived knowing that their little filly was out there, but that they couldn’t see her, and it was very hard, but they managed with the help of Shining. Thankfully, Celestia kept him in Canterlot as one of her personal guards so he could remain with them, so he was never sent away to another city or to some camp.

They missed their little Twily so much…

Then, as they finished their meal, they heard a very light knock on a window. When they looked to see what it was, they could see through the glass…

The skeleton of what seemed to be a rat.

It was waving at them.

For a brief moment, they were disturbed, but then, they understood that this rat may belong to their daughter, so Twilight Velvet ran to the window to open it.

Immediately, she asked, “Twilight?”

The rat nodded. “I’m one of her undead. Name’s Mickey. Can I enter? Wouldn’t want somepony to see me and panic, ahah.”

“Of course! Enter!” the mare said before she moved aside, letting Mickey enter before she closed the window. Immediately, she bombarded the rat with questions. “How is Twilight? Is she alright? Has something happened? Is Prince Golden Crown still with her? Is she coming home?”

Mickey raised his paw to sign to her to calm down. “Woah woah woah! One at a time! I can’t answer if you don’t give me the opportunity! Your daughter is fine. Despite some recent… complications, she is doing well in her lair in the jungle. Golden Crown, Goldie, is still with her, constantly helping her and being a very good friend. Sadly, she isn’t coming home. Her place isn’t in Canterlot. The ponies would never accept her.”

“I’m sure that we can do something about that with Princess Celestia’s help!”

Mickey shrugged. “Maybe. Speaking of, she is now willing to talk with Princess Celestia.”

Behind Twilight Velvet, Night Light looked at the rat with hope. “Really? She is willing to finally trust her?”

“Apparently. She seemed very hesitant when she told me that, but she seemed willing to try. However, I can’t enter the castle with all these guards everywhere that would attack me on sight, so she told me to talk to you so you can bring me to Princess Celestia. She wants her to come to her lair. She doesn’t feel like coming to Canterlot.”

The two adult ponies exchanged glances, then Twilight Velvet asked, “Can we come?”

“She hasn’t said anything against, so I guess that you can, ahah. Well, if Princess Celestia agrees to let you come with her.”

“I’m sure that she will,” Night Light said before he lowered to let the rat climb on him. “Let’s go.”

Celestia was pleasantly surprised when a guard entered her room before she could lower the sun to tell her that Twilight Velvet and Night Light wanted to see her, and that they had an undead rat with them.

An undead rat. Celestia immediately felt hope rising within her.

“Let them come.”

Soon enough, the couple was in her room, along with Shining Armor and the rat who presented himself.

“Princess wants to see you,” he then said.

Celestia raised an eyebrow. “Princess?”

Mickey chuckled. “It was either that or we called her Mistress. You can thank her friend Goldie for that.”

“Goldie… Golden Crown?” Celestia asked.

“Yes, that’s him. But he prefers that we call him Goldie.”

Celestia smiled at that. “I see. Yes, he would do that. Why has Twilight Sparkle changed her mind about me?”

“I don’t know. She sent me here to Canterlot to… Uh… Keep an eye, and I haven’t really followed the actuality on her side. I never bothered to ask what was going on.”

“So you are Twily’s spy?” Shining Armor asked

“That’s right. I was keeping watch in Canterlot in case anything interesting happened.”

“Like when I would go south to Klugetown?” Celestia asked.

“Yep. Warned her the moment you left the castle.”

Shining Armor sighed. “Twily is too smart for her own good.”

“Anyway, so, Princess doesn’t feel too keen coming to Canterlot, so she wonders if it would be possible for you to come to her lair.”

Celestia nodded. “I can come, yes.”

“Can we come too?” Twilight Velvet asked.

Celestia smiled at her. “Yes, you can. It’s only right for you to see your daughter again.” She then thought for a few seconds. “And I guess that I should bring another guest that I’m sure that Twilight Sparkle will be happy to meet. This will have to wait for tomorrow however, it is getting quite late. I have to lower the sun.”

“Of course, Princess,” Night Light said with a bow.

Celestia hoped that they will be able to sleep tonight. She couldn’t imagine what it was like for them, finally getting to see their lost daughter only to have to wait. But it was better this way. The journey to the jungle will be long. It was best to have a night of sleep so they could depart refreshed in the morning.

The next day, when she saw the family again, she could see that they failed to have a good night, as she had feared. During their flight, if they want, she will give them a sleep spell.

A chariot was readied, a dozen pegasi ready to pull it in the sky.

Soon, they were flying.

They took a stop at Dodge City so the pegasi could rest. After that, they flew above the Badlands, then reached the jungle. Celestia spotted several shipwrecks that had been absent the last time she came here two years ago, but she didn’t question it. Mickey probably didn’t know. There were also signs that fires happened, and there were even areas that were entirely destroyed. Eventually, Mickey pointed at a large tree that was taller than the others.

“The lair is at the foot of this tree.”

Celestia looked down at the jungle, the trees leaving very little space.

“It will be difficult to land the chariot. I should have thought of that.”

“Uh. One moment,” Mickey said before he became silent. A few moments later, he said, “Sunny and Leviathan will clear a path for us.”

Before anypony could ask, they saw two dragon skeletons fly from further in the jungle, one that looked normal, although some of its bones were missing, and another that was clearly the result of an amalgamation of several dragons. Five, judging by its five heads. The two then began to uproot trees, creating a clearing not far from the big tree.

“Where did Twily find dragons?” Shining Armor asked as he looked in awe at the behemoths.

“It looks like she went to the Dragon Lands,” Celestia said.

Eventually, the clearing was large enough that the chariot could land.

Once on the ground, the skeleton of a unicorn wearing armor similar to the Royal Guards, but made of iron instead of gold, came from between the trees before bowing.

“I’m Captain Star Eyes. I’ll guide you to Princess.”

“Very well, Captain. We will follow you,” Celestia said before she left the chariot, then picked up the little guest she brought and put him on her back. The others descended the chariot too, and the pegasi detached themselves so they could follow too as their escort.

The group followed Star Eyes, quickly reaching the entrance to the lair.

It was quite simple. No extravagance such as statues, symbols, or other decorations. It looked like Twilight Sparkle hadn’t developed an ego.

There were various undead animals surrounding the entrance, from wolves to elephants, and even a hydra. Celestia could also spot on the branches of the large tree behind the entrance countless undead birds. Finally, there were two guards beside the doors, both earth ponies.

Captain Star Eyes opened the doors, revealing stairs that descended underground, with torches on the walls. At the bottom were other doors leading to a room with several more guards, mostly ponies, but there was also a couple of griffins and a donkey. Beside them, the room was entirely empty.

“Time for me to leave. While I’m here, I will give a look at the library,” Mickey said before he passed through a cat flap in the door at the opposite side of the entrance.

Meanwhile, Star Eyes pointed at a door at the right. “Behind this door is the apartment section of the lair. Princess is waiting for you there. We… have nowhere for your guards, but they can explore the lair if they want. We have two libraries and a game room.”

Celestia nodded, then told her guards to do what they wanted, keeping only two.

Meanwhile, Shining Armor chuckled. “Of course Twily has two libraries.”

“A third one is being built as we speak,” Star Eyes informed.

The three members of the family burst into laughter at that, and Star Eyes joined them. The little passenger on Celestia’s back copied them and began to laugh too.

Eventually, they passed the door, entering a hallway that turned right. However, they stopped at the first door where the hallway turned.

“Behind this door,” Star Eyes said before she opened it.

Immediately, the two remaining guards placed themselves at both sides of the door while Celestia followed the Captain who was saluting at someone inside the room.

“Princess Celestia is here, Princess. Your family is here too.”

“Thank you Star Eyes,” a childish voice replied.

Celestia entered the room, clearly a living room, and there, on a couch against the right wall, she saw Twilight Sparkle, gently petting a skeleton cat.

The last time she saw the filly, she had been an unmoving corpse, dead to the world, but still with all its flesh and blood. Now, she was a moving skeleton with little purple flames in the eye sockets, like she saw and fought so many times in the past. Of course, being dead, she hadn’t grown at all in the last two years.

Beside her, against the wall, was a magical staff, a very tall one, with a crystal at the extremity.

The filly stared at her. Sadly, with her being a skeleton, she had no expression for Celestia to read, so she couldn’t tell what she was thinking.

The staring didn’t last long however before Twilight Velvet ran toward her daughter with a shout of “Twilight!” to embrace her. There was no hesitation. She didn’t care that she was hugging a skeleton. Night Light followed her right after, followed by Shining Armor.

“Oh, Twilight, we were so worried!”

“Are you alright?”

“I’m so glad to see you again!”

“I thought that we would never see you again!”

“Finally, we are together again.”

“Has anything happened to you?”

This continued for a moment as Twilight Sparkle looked at her parents and her brother before she said, “M-mom… dad… Shiny…” She finally returned the hug. “I’m so sorry for leaving… But I was so scared…”

“Shhh… It’s alright. We are here now,” Twilight Velvet said as she rubbed her daughter’s skull.

Silently, Captain Star Eyes left the room.

Just after, another unicorn skeleton entered the room from a different door, a trail levitating beside it.

“Here is the tea and biscuits.”

“Thank you Sunshine. Put them on the table,” Twilight Sparkle said, not moving her head from beside her mother’s chest.

The skeleton did so, then bowed before leaving the room through the same door.

The family remained together for a while longer, and Celestia didn’t mind waiting. After a couple of minutes, however, she finally decided to talk.

“There is one last family member who has been impatient to meet you.”

This made the family break their group hug, and Twilight Sparkle looked at her again, Celestia guessed in confusion.

“Another family member? What?” Then she gasped and looked at her parents. “Do I have a little sister or little brother now?”

The adults chuckled before Night Light said, “I guess that it’s up to you to decide what you consider him.”

Celestia then levitated her little passenger from her back, her head having hidden him from the filly’s view all this time. She made sure to tell Mickey, then Star Eyes, to not tell Twilight Sparkle about him, having wanted to keep him a surprise.

Then, she gently dropped him in front of her legs.

A little purple baby dragon with a light green belly and green spikes from his head to his tail.

He was looking curiously at Twilight, a bit hesitant, but not scared.

“I present to you Spike. He is the baby dragon that you hatched that day, at the exam.”

Twilight Sparkle looked at the baby dragon, she guessed in awe. Celestia wasn’t sure if she remembered having hatched him in the chaos of the moment, and then with the whole dying and becoming-a-lich part.

She jumped down from the couch, then slowly approached the dragon.

“Do you remember him?” Celestia asked.

Twilight Sparkle nodded silently as she continued to approach until she was just in front of him. Then, after a moment of hesitation, she raised a hoof toward him, stopping before his face. In turn, Spike raised his claws to grab the hoof.

“Uh… Hello, little one,” Twilight Sparkle then said.

Spike stared at her in the eyes, then said, “Mommy?”

Celestia wasn’t surprised that he would ask that. Since his birth, she had been talking to him about the filly who hatched him, preparing him for the day he would meet her if it ever happened. She didn’t know much about Twilight Sparkle however, so she often left him at the family’s house where they were able to tell him more while getting to know him and, rapidly, including him to the family. That was the reason why Spike wasn’t scared of Twilight Sparkle despite her appearance.

And without surprise, the little one quickly saw her as his mother, and he really had been impatient to meet her.

Now, to see how Twilight Sparkle reacted to that.

She clearly hadn’t expected that, judging by her jaw opening in shock.

After a moment however, she said, “I… I’m your mommy, uh? I… I don’t know if…”

At this moment, Spike hugged her. Twilight Sparkle eventually returned it.

The filly then looked up at the adults. “I don’t know if I can be his mommy! I live in the middle of a jungle! Away from all civilization! And I have no idea how to take care of him! And I don’t know if it would be alright for him to grow among the dead!”

“Then return to Canterlot with us,” Twilight Velvet said.

“You know I can’t,” Twilight Sparkle replied sadly. “I don’t have my place among the ponies… I will never be accepted…”

“I’m sure that the ponies will eventually open up to you if you show that you aren’t bad.”

“I don’t know…” She sighed. “You should sit. The tea will get cold.”

Twilight Sparkle then went to sit on the couch, and her parents went to sit on both sides of her, the skeleton cat moving away. Shining Armor went to sit on a chair, and Celestia did the same. Spike went to sit on Twilight Sparkle’s lap. While the filly seemed awkward at first about it, she quickly accepted it, even wrapping him with a leg.

Then Spike finally decided to talk, telling Twilight Sparkle about his life in the castle and with her parents. The filly listened attentively, occasionally saying or asking something. Everypony looked at them with warm smiles.

“Then I hiccuped, fire comed out of my mouth, and his beard burned.”

Twilight Sparkle laughed. “The poor guy. I hope he wasn’t too angry at you.”

“A little. But Miss Care maked him not angry anymore.”

“Glad to hear. Mmh… Do you have lots of friends?”

Spike looked sad at that. “No…”

“Then let me present one to you,” the filly said before the skeleton cat returned. She then levitated it before the young drake. “I present to you Felix!”

The cat waved. “Hello! I’m Felix! Do you want to play with me?”

Spike gasped, then excitedly shouted, “Yes!”

Twilight Sparkle then dropped the cat who ran to a different part of the room, and Spike followed him. Before long, they could hear his laugh as he chased Felix.

The ponies looked at him for a moment before they moved their attention away.

“So, Twilight Sparkle,” Celestia began as she soaked a biscuit in her tea. “I heard that you met a necromancer named Death Speaker who helped you. Where is he?”

Silence followed for several seconds before Twilight Sparkle answered, “He isn’t here anymore. I don’t know where he is.”

Judging by her voice, it was a sore subject. Better leave it.

“I saw several shipwrecks in the jungle while we were flying above it. Has something happened here?”

“Uhuh. There was that guy who wanted to invade Equestria. Called himself the Storm King. He had a huge armada of airships, and these hulking beasts called storm creatures. He invaded a lot of countries before coming here. So I stopped him. There was a huge battle several weeks ago, and these shipwrecks are what is left of his armada.”

Celestia, and everypony else, looked at Twilight Sparkle in awe.

She counted several dozen airships out there, and they weren’t small airships. Destroying such a huge armada wasn’t a small feat. Also, Celestia felt glad that Twilight Sparkle decided to defend Equestria.

“Is this why I received reports of undead unearthing bodies all over Equestria weeks ago?”

“Uh… Yeah. Sorry about that. I needed troops, and animals wouldn’t have been enough.”

“And what happened to the Storm King?”

The filly winced. “Uuuh… He is now one of my undead, along with the majority of his storm creatures.”

Celestia nodded. She couldn’t hold it against her. It had been a war, and Celestia herself killed quite a number of villains. Shining Armor understood too, being a soldier, even if he himself never killed.

However, learning that their filly killed someone clearly was a shock to the parents, but they decided to not say anything.

Twilight Sparkle then levitated the staff, showing it to Celestia.

“This staff belonged to him. The Staff of Sacanas. It can manipulate the weather and absorb magic. The Storm King wanted to use it to get all the magic of Equestria for himself.”

Celestia almost winced. It would have been Tirek all over again, except that this time, the villain would have had an army. This would have been bad. That was a very dangerous artifact that Twilight Sparkle obtained.

“I also obtained a lot of other stuff from the Storm King once I looted his HQ on an island south of here. He plundered many countries from both their wealth and magical artifacts on his path of conquest, and not knowing where everything goes, I decided to keep everything. Now, I don’t have to sell undead to Klugetown to get money to buy stuff for the lair.”

Again, Celestia was impressed. “That must be a lot of wealth.”

“Not as much as you may think. He used a lot of money to maintain his armada, I guess, because the treasure wasn’t that big. Still a lot, but not as big as expected after having plundered who knows how many countries.”

“All these airships must have cost a lot, yes,” Shining Armor agreed.

“Has anything else happened?” Celestia asked.

“No other villains appeared, no,” Twilight Sparkle answered. “However, I went to Thanatos’ lair several days ago.”

Celestia paled. “How did…?”

“Death Speaker told me about him, and he asked me if I could get his staff for him so he could use it to not die of old age. He was really old, you see, and I didn’t want him to die, so I agreed. With the Staff of Sacanas, I was able to reach the throne room.”

“Was… Thanatos there?”

“Uhuh. But you don’t have to worry about him anymore.”

“You killed him?” the alicorn asked in disbelief.

“Not at all. I couldn’t even defeat him even without his staff. No, he killed himself. He had had enough of his life. So he gave me all his possessions before he destroyed his phylactery.”

“So… You have his staff?”

“No, Death Speaker took it before leaving me. Turns out he mentored me only to use me to get what he wanted,” Twilight Sparkle said gravely.

Oh… No wonder it was a sore subject… And now, Celestia was scared thinking about a necromancer with THAT staff being somewhere out there.

Shining Armor was obviously very angry, and the parents were now hugging their daughter.

“I can’t believe that somepony would manipulate a filly like that,” Night Light said.

“Someone,” Twilight Sparkle corrected. “Death Speaker is a minotaur.” She then looked at Celestia. “Princess… What is your plan for me?”