In Tooth And Mane

by Aquaman

Rating: teen
Tags: Other, Romance, Original Character, Adventure, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 17061

The twelve super-powered members of the Zodiac have their work cut out for them when a immensely powerful enemy threatens to destroy not only the newly formed nation of Equestria, but the bonds they share with each other as well.

The ponies of Equestria have always looked to the stars for guidance—and there's a very good reason for that. Back in ancient times, when the three pony tribes first united together under the Equestrian flag, the stars weren't just their guides. They were their guardians.

They were the Zodiac, twelve immortal ponies endowed with preternatural powers reaching far beyond those of a normal stallion or mare. For centuries, they served as the first, last, and best line of defense for ponykind. But when an immensely powerful foe threatens to destroy not only the newly formed nation of Equestria, but the immutable institution of the Zodiac itself, the patron saints of the stars above have their work cut out for them. With the fate of the entire world in their hooves, aspiring Hunter Leo and the rest of her super-powered friends can't afford to fail. Luckily for the mortals down below, though, that's exactly the way they like things.

After all, those vicious beasts and demons of Hades aren't about to slay themselves.

Published 2013-01-13 19:00:01 UTC
Last updated 2013-02-02 21:00:27 UTC

Prologue

The cloaked figure moved quickly but silently, his horn giving off a dull yellow glow just bright enough to keep the overgrown path beneath his hooves visible. There was no need to hurry, of course, but all the same he kept his pace swift. Even after dreaming of this day for years, even after imagining his final plan so many times that the image of his triumph was all he saw when he closed his eyes each night, he still felt a shimmering bubble of excitement floating around in his chest. Tonight was the night he would finally do it. Tonight would be the beginning of everyone else's end.

The path narrowed, and he forced himself back down to a walk. Uncontrollable glee wasn't a good enough excuse to risk breaking his neck reaching the place. In any case, it couldn't be more than a quarter mile off by now, assuming the map he'd taken from that decrepit old pegasus with the wooden eye and the missing wing was accurate. To be honest, it had almost felt wrong to get so friendly with her, only to steal her prized possession when her back was turned and leave her broken and alone in that filthy cave. In retrospect, it wouldn’t have been hard to put her out of her misery right then and there: direct contact with the back of her skull, and a quick jolt from his horn sent straight to the center of her brain stem. Total annihilation of all electrical impulses in a single moment, and complete cerebral shutdown in the next. Like blowing out the flame in an oil lamp. She wouldn't have felt a thing. It would’ve been more than she deserved, considering the stories that had led him to her.

But that moral conundrum could be dealt with later, when time itself would have no meaning to him. He had arrived.

The Fortress of the Four. The bastion of all things unknown and unsavory to the common colt or filly. The Palace of Malice, as a few jokers supposedly called it in a fashion that hadn’t caught on with nearly enough ponies these days. Whatever you wanted to call it, the name itself didn't matter. Nothing outside those crumbling walls mattered. What was inside, what would be inside, that was what he had come for. That was where all his research and all his careful planning would finally come to fruition.

He had never felt so alive in his entire life.

The Fortress was deserted, as he had every reason to expect it would be, but despite that assurance he still entered slowly, mostly out of reverence for the colossal structure. The outer walls were thirty feet high and hewn out of what looked like obsidian, and the immense castle garrisoned behind it seemed to reach up to the sky and then melt into it. The tip of the impossibly tall tower in the center pierced straight through the clouds and into whatever wonders lay above. It'd be quite a climb to reach the top, but it wouldn't even be close to the hardest part of his journey here. Without another thought on the matter, he continued forward, and trotted through the colossal front entryway into the cavernous main hall.

Once he was safely within the confines of the pitch-black foyer, the unicorn allowed a bit more power to seep into the tip of his horn. The growing light threw twitching shadows all over the black and white-speckled marble, each one shifting shapes a thousand times in the blink of an eye. He paused to watch them for a bit, then kept moving onward, towards the back of the hall.

Twenty paces in, left at the pedestal, up onto the landing and through the first door on the right, he reminded himself. Don’t forget to wipe your hooves.

The rusty hinges shrieked with complaint, but the shrouded unicorn showed no signs of sympathy. Pausing only to kick the door tightly shut behind him again, he trotted briskly up the steep and spiraling steps, absentmindedly counting each one while his heartbeat raced inside his throat. A few minutes and roughly three hundred and fifty-eight steps later, he came to another door, this one very different from the first. It was a good deal thicker and braced with what had once been sturdy iron plates, and all across the dusty wood were carved ancient symbols and figures that the archaeological teams back home would've given their left hooves to get a gander at.

Chuckling and rolling his eyes at the thought, he pushed the door open unceremoniously with his hoof, making a mental note to get rid of it as soon as possible. The fewer reminders he had of those stuffy, erudite, infuriatingly close-minded scholars, the better. And the fewer reminders he had of the fact that he had spent too much of his life trying to work with them, the better.

He wasted no time in moving into the circular room, killing the light from his horn and strolling over the threshold as if he owned the place—which, for all intents and purposes, he basically did now. As he reached the center of the tower, he shrugged off his hood, revealing a stiff black mane buzzed down almost to his neck and a pair of fiery red eyes that twinkled with equal parts wonder and amusement. The rest of the cloak fell to the ground a moment later, and he flicked his tail in appreciation of being freed from the unwieldy garment, his cutie mark—an asterisk-like figure with a solid black circle over its vertex and arrows capping both ends of each intersecting line—shifting in tandem with the rest of his flank. The place was right. The time was perfect. Now all he had to do was cast the spell.

He had written down the incantation months ago amongst the hundreds of scribbles, sketches, and doodles in his dog-eared old research notebook, but he had read and reread the sixteen lines it consisted of so many times since then that the proper words were all but branded into his brain. No sense, then, wasting any more time when there was no one around to appreciate the dramatic effect. He turned to face the door, straightened up to his full height, and began.

O, ye devilish damn'd steeds

Of hateful blood and wicked creed,

Rise up from black eternity;

Come forward, gather unto me.

As soon as the first words left his lips, all motion in the surrounding forest seemed to cease. The air inside the room grew warm, and the crackling scent of ozone began to fill his nose. Corny as the rhyme was, it was working. Something was stirring.

Sinful arrogance, unkempt fire,

bloody wrath and mad desire,

idleness and cravings dire:

'Neath thy hooves this world expires.

The stones in the walls hummed with energy, and the ceiling quivered with barely restrained power. Beneath his hooves, the floor of the lofty chamber began to glow, thin lines of light snaking out from the circle he was standing in towards the far edges of the room.

Seven names in whispers told,

Seven fearsome fiends of old,

Let thy broken wings unfold

So mortal eyes, thy strength behold.

A distant rumble set the tower shaking, ancient dust showering down from the girders and beams that had been keeping the roof of the tower aloft for thousands of years. In the back of his mind, he wondered whether the prehistoric spire could even handle the treatment he was putting it through, but the raw, nearly uncontrollable power coursing through his body was enough to whisk that concern away as quickly as it had come. He couldn’t bear to stop now. Not when the ceremony was almost complete. Not when he was this close to success.

He hunched his shoulders and locked his legs, his head and horn throbbing with light. He finished the spell through gritted teeth.

Now come, O creatures fierce and fain,

Your vengeance o'er this land shall rain,

For command ye I, in tooth and mane:

To glory ye shall rise again!

Abruptly, the rumbling stopped. For a long, terrifying moment, all was still.

And then, a deafening explosion rocked the tower and sent its lone occupant careening off into the far wall. When he got his hooves untangled and cracked one grimy eyelid open, he saw that he was still alive, and that the room around him was still intact. And what he also saw, in perfect accordance with the legends and myths he’d heard a thousand times over, was an ethereal golden ring of light in the sky, centered right overtop the tower and spreading rapidly away from it in all directions.

He let his head clunk back against the wall, and an almost foalish giggle spilled out of his throat. The spell had worked. It had really, truly, one-hundred-percent-seriously worked. The first phase of his plan was complete. And after Phase One would come Phase Two, then Phase Three, then a few other Phases and Steps and stuff which would segue into each other and tie up all the Loose Ends, as Phases in Plans were wont to do. And then, when it was all said and done...

Victory. No, wait, even better: Revolution. Yeah, that sounded just perfect. He repeated the word aloud, the syllables rolling off his tongue in the most delicious, momentous way. Revolution. The end of the beginning. The return to the status quo. The leveling of the playing field. The single greatest achievement of any mortal pony in the history of the universe.

He hugged his hooves around himself and brushed the dust from his forelegs, his smile still growing even after the golden ring faded off into the distance. So the peasants and the invalids back home were ready for the world to change, were they? Well, ask and ye shall receive. There went change now, rocketing away from the Fortress of the Four at an incalculable speed. Equinekind’s new era was about to begin. His era. His world. His moment of ultimate and everlasting glory.

Far off in the distance, the animals of the so-called Everfree Forest were being rudely yanked from their slumber, poking their heads out of dens, nests, and treetop canopies to blearily blink up at the blinding, glimmering light that had just passed overhead. If they had known what it signified, they might’ve felt a deep, instinctive dread of the unearthly horrors that would soon be revived. If they had realized the extent the ring would travel in that single night, they might’ve run for the hills instead of lazily yawning and shuffling back into their homes. If they had known the identity of the cloaked figure responsible for it all, they might’ve known better than to try to escape.

And if they had looked towards a crumbling, deserted tower in the middle of an uninhabited, unexplored, and virtually unknown part of the forest, they might’ve heard that mysterious cloaked figure throw back his head and laugh.

Author's Note

The very select few of you who may have followed my writing way back in my FFN/pre-FIMFiction days may recognize portions of this opening chapter, as well as the title itself, from an identically-named story that was published on Equestria Daily approximately forever ago. This story, to put it as bluntly as I can, is not that one. While it will reuse several antagonists and a couple heavily reworded and edited old chapters, the plot and main characters of this fic are entirely different, and the main villain is a more canon-related entity with vastly divergent motives and, if I'm being honest, a much better writer behind him.

Chapter 1: Homecoming

Within the mountaintop stronghold of Oasis, there were—according to Pisces—exactly one thousand, two hundred and eighty-five different animals, exactly one hundred and six of which were butterflies, exactly four of whom were currently flapping their way through the southeastern sector of Capricorn’s flower gardens. Although Pisces had only managed to name eight hundred and eighty of her beloved pets so far, the four delicate creatures cresting over one of Cap’s immaculately trimmed hillocks needed no extra introduction. Their colors spoke for themselves: brilliant splotches of red, blue, green, orange, and every other hue imaginable covered their wings, each design intricately formed and unique to the single butterfly who owned it.

Dipping and twitching through the air in a roughly rectangular formation, the quartet followed the slope of the hill down to a neatly organized collection of yellow tulips, where each peeled off to perch on the rim of a flower of their choosing. One of the butterflies, the biggest and brightest of the lot, nearly left the patch entirely before finding a suitable spot to land. He swooped down gently on a bud near the very edge of the last row, the stalk of the flimsy plant bending ever so slightly under his weight, and let his wings slowly fall open. The fading evening light shone through them, painting the ground with long streaks of hot pink and robin’s egg blue.

For several seconds, his only movement was to gently flex his wings up and down a few times, reveling in the warmth provided by the setting sun. His demeanor showed him to be completely at ease, which was great, because that meant the furry brown creature peeking out from behind the next row over had laid her trap well. Her prey was in range, separated from his pack and shamefully exposed. All that was left now was to close the gap. She crouched low to the ground, narrowed her eyes until they were barely slitted open, and sucked in one last breath.

“RrrrrrrRAAA-owww!”

For a moment, shock and disappointment weighed her down like lead. How could this have happened? Everything had been perfect: the approach, the timing, the painstaking observation of flight patterns and escape tactics. And yet here she was, spread-eagled in the middle of a flower bed, spitting out tulip parts while her target floated away on the breeze, casually gliding along as if he hadn’t just been inches from his horrific and highly professional demise.

“Hey!” she shouted after the butterfly, frantically readjusting the grungy beige costume that covered up most of her pale blue coat and messy gray mane. It was this blasted thing’s fault, she soon decided. What the hay was the point of a lion costume if it didn’t make you any better at hunting? Whoever made this thing was going to have a lot of excuses to make when she got back to the Great Hall.

The fact that she had made the costume herself briefly slipping her mind, the mare inside it sprang to her hooves and gave chase, her winged prey flying leisurely enough for her to catch up but still too high to reach. Not that a fearless warrior like her was about to give up on that account, though.

“Get back here!” she grunted after her third near miss. If only she could fly like Sagittarius, or shape-shift like Cancer. That butterfly’d sure be humming a different tune if it were being chased by a real lion, or by a mare with springs for hooves. Gritting her teeth, she channeled all of her strength into her hind legs and imagined herself soaring twenty feet high in a single bound, concentrating on the thought as hard as she could.

Springs for hooves, springs for hooves, springs springs springs springs...”

“Gotcha!” she shouted, but her triumphant cry came too soon. The butterfly skirted out of her grasp once more by the tips of his wings, and too late for her to get her hooves back under her before she landed hard on top of the hillock it had now returned to. It took her a good half-minute to roll to a stop at the bottom, and her head was spinning too much for her to do anything but dizzily watch her prey deftly flit down towards her and settle on the tip of her nose.

“Showoff,” she mumbled, sticking her bottom lip out and blowing the butterfly off her face in the same breath. As she lay defeated in the grass watching it flutter away again, the warbling sound of a gemshorn wafted into her ears, the familiar two-note call sending a spark of excitement flitting down her spine. That sound could only mean one thing: the Hunters were back. And the Hunters would have news about the peace treaty from the pony tribes down in Terra. Not to mention, he would be with them.

Any embarrassment she felt over the failures of the last few minutes vanished in a flash, and she threw herself into a full sprint for Oasis’s front gate, which the Hunters would surely be walking through any minute now. Sure enough, a monstrous stallion the size of three mortal ones put together came into view the second she rounded the back of Aquarius’s workshop and clattered out into the cobblestone plaza in front of the Great Hall, his cherry red fur seeming to glow from the intense orange sunlight bearing down on it from the west.

“Taurus!” she yelled out, the tricky footing of the street underhoof not enough to keep her from diving at the Hunter’s neck and swinging around to land on his back. It was a daily ritual of theirs: she’d try to tackle him, and end up being satisfied if one of his bulging muscles gave a little bit. Life kinda had to be full of little victories like that when your best friend and pseudo-big brother was a hulking mass of an indestructible deity strong enough to smash through half a city without breaking a sweat.

“‘Sup, Mister T,” she sang into his ear, shimmying up to his neck and hooking her forehooves around the bull horns in his glinting steel helmet. “How’d the guard duty go?”

Taurus shrugged, his exuberant accomplice riding the flexing of his deltoids as the Zodiac’s resident pony of few words spoke two of the eight he’d probably use while he was home this time. “Good enough,” he said slowly, in his typically deep, gravelly tone.

“You beat anypony up?”

“Didn’t need to.”

“Fight your way through an army of evildoers, saving the day and succeeding through impossible odds?”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

Dang. That was eight words already. “Puh-leeeease?” she begged, sliding off his shoulder to cling onto Taurus’s foreleg, which he then lifted horizontally up into the air so she wouldn’t get stepped on as he continued into the courtyard. “What happened? Spill the beans!”

Taurus shrugged again, leveling a seemingly disinterested stare at the costumed mare hanging off his raised ankle.

“C’mon,” she intoned, her nose crinkled in frustration. “Beans. Spill ‘em.”

“Sorry, squirt,” a new voice interrupted before Taurus could work up the ennui to shrug again. “Ain’t many beans to spill this time.”

To somepony unaccustomed to the extraordinary abilities the twelve members of the Zodiac possessed, the sight that greeted the two of them when they turned around might’ve been horrifying. The mare trotting up the last few steps leading up to Oasis was hardly equine enough to even be called one. Jet-black, chitinous scales coated her body all the way back to the tip of her abnormally long tail, and strapped to her forehooves were two wickedly sharp curved blades, each one extending out perpendicular to her torso and punctuated with jagged little teeth along the last six inches near the tip.

As she neared the front gate, though, her features began to soften. The scales shimmered and cracked apart, dissolving into her skin until her natural colors surfaced once more: cerise in her coat and a greyish shade of purple in her tomboyish mane and deftly knotted tail.

“Borders were clear the whole way through,” she said, yanking at the straps of her left-hoof blade with her teeth as she walked. “Only thing even close to action was a little pack’a Windigos we ran into a couple miles back. Hardly even worth powering up for.”

“Speak for yourself, Scorpio,” came another feminine voice from somewhere overhead. Scorpio tugged off her other blade and smirked, not even so much as flinching as the largest eagle anyone present had ever seen—almost twice Taurus’s height, with easily an eighteen-foot wingspan—swooped in for a hard landing mere feet from her side. The massive bird fluffed its wings and coughed, and for a moment its deadly beak and beady black eyes seemed to bubble and undulate, as if the updraft of a fire were bending the light around and distorting it. Then, with a distantly audible pop, the predator’s once imposing visage was gone, replaced by the rounded, somewhat less awe-inspiring head of a lavender earth mare with a frizzy indigo mane.

“You weren’t the one who had to mop up the mess you made scattering them halfway to the Eastern Shore,” she griped, daintily lifting one of her feet and inspecting the foot-long talons attached to it. “Do you have any idea how cold windigos are? I won’t be able to feel my toes for a month!”

“Which I’m sure would be awfully tragic if you actually had toes,” Scorpio jabbed back, her grin widening as the pony-headed eagle gave her a dirty look before quickly completing her transition into her normal equine body, steadfastly resisting the urge to glance down at her distinctly toe-less hooves. “Quit bein’ such a pansy, Cancer. Sagittarius didn’t have any trouble. Did you, Sage?”

Her last remark was directed at yet another new arrival, this one a muted orange pegasus stallion with a spiky black mane and a gold-encrusted composite bow hanging off his shoulder. The similarly decorated quiver on his back was empty but for two silver arrows, and the look in his eyes bridged the gap between dismissive and flattered. “Cancer did most of the work,” he argued, the pitch of his voice a bit more youthful than his lithe, muscular frame might have suggested. “Running interference isn’t exactly life-threatening.”

“‘Specially when you’re flitting around at half the speed of sound,” Cancer grumbled, though the slight blush in her cheeks betrayed her appreciation of Sage’s compliment. He always did that: deflected any praise thrown his way towards whoever he felt needed it. Of course, he also always did that traveling-at-half-the-speed-of-sound thing too, but that was a whole other story.

“See, that’s the problem with you shape-shifters,” Scorpio went on. “You’re never happy with what you’ve got. You gotta loosen up a bit. Y’know, have some fun amidst the blood-soaked chaos. Like me, the way I’m all... I mean, how I’m so, um... what’s the word I’m looking for?”

“Hubristic?” Sagittarius piped up.

“Obdurate?” Cancer added a moment later.

“Ooh, oblivious, that could work,” Sagittarius tossed out after a moment’s pause, earning a snicker from Cancer and a glare from Scorpio.

“Remind me to smack you both when I figure out what those words mean,” she growled, though like Cancer before her threat had a playful tinge to it. Sagittarius, though, waited a second too long for the opportunity to tease her back.

“All right, Hunters, that’s enough,” a canary yellow pegasus with a close-cropped purple and yellow-striped mane ordered, her uncommonly husky voice friendly but firm. “Do me a favor and save the bickering for someplace I can’t hear it, would you?”

Scorpio turned away from her long enough to stick her tongue out at Sagittarius—she always got the last word in, and Sagittarius always let her—but quickly straightened up once Libra, the eagle-eyed leader of the Gatherers who’d probably quite literally seen their little tussle coming, passed by. She was the kind of mare who made every crowd she walked through look lesser by comparison: intelligent, confident, and probably the only Gatherer not only willing but able to go tête-a-tête with a Hunter any day of the week. With all that being said, though, she was still an easygoing flying addict, and diplomatic and wise for every one of the Zodiac to trust her as both a capable commander and a good friend.

And yet, her presence did little to free the mare in the lion costume from wondering if she’d accidentally swallowed one of the butterflies she’d been chasing before. Only four Hunters were here now. There were supposed to be six. Even a few others from her group, the Gatherers, were coming out to greet their friends: there was Aquarius nudging the door to her workshop closed, and Gemini bouncing down the front steps of the Great Hall in perfect sync with her twin. Where was he?

“I swear, you’d live in that helmet if we didn’t force you into the Bathhouse every now and then,” Libra told Taurus, her knowing gaze drifting from his spotless armor towards the disheveled mare still hanging off his foreleg. Disarming Libra’s stare with a cheeky grin, she slid back down to the ground and allowed Taurus the use of his leg again, mimicking his motions as he pulled the headwear off and ran a hoof through his badly matted white mohawk.

“What’s the news?” the now de-maned mare asked again. Libra’s gift was, as she liked to call it, “farsightedness”: if she could picture a place in the world or a living thing within it, her eyes would go completely white, and she’d be able to see it or them no matter where they were or what they were doing. Libra had to have checked in on the Hunters during the day, but even she dodged the question.

“Pretty sure you’ve already heard it,” she told her, tucking her hunting horn away into the small pack strapped to her side as she spoke. “One small skirmish near Galloping Gorge, and clear skies and smooth sailing the whole rest of the way.”

“Yeah, okay, I know that. But what about the negotiations? Did they work? Are the tribes all together now?” Her eyes were focused on Libra, but her mind was miles away, searching for any sign of the Hunters’ fifth and sixth member. She hadn’t even listened to her own questions, let alone whatever Libra said in reply. He couldn’t have gotten hurt or captured. The rest of the group wouldn’t be acting all happy and carefree like this. But he wasn’t the type to ever be late either. He was fine, though. He had to be fine. In just a second, he’d come trotting up those steps, and then-

“Your guess is as good as ours, Leo.”

The words hit her like a stiff breeze, cutting through her body in one freezing-cold burst and muffling out the rest of the world around her. Somehow, she hadn’t noticed him coming up around the side of the gate, his toned haunches just barely tensed with the strain of pulling himself up the last few steps. He didn’t look pained at all by the effort; in fact, he looked like the very ideal of masculine strength and tenacity, a perfect godlike being among other slightly less perfect godlike beings. Every part of him seemed charged with an otherworldly light, none more so than the soft violet orbs peering out from behind spotless gold armor garnished with a pair of ram’s horns on either side of his temples.

He pulled his helmet off in one fluid motion, releasing the windswept navy blue locks underneath that so superbly complemented his periwinkle coat. To the other mares living down in Terra and up above it in Oasis, Aries was quite an attractive stallion. To Leo, though, he was heaven on hooves, and now those hooves were walking right towards her.

“We weren’t there for any of the meetings,” he went on. “The tribe leaders and their advisors were the only ones allowed inside in, so we’re stuck waiting with the rest of the world to hear what they decided.” His electric gaze now turned to Libra, and with it came a chuckle that dripped with false camaraderie. “Course, Virgo and Libra here don’t have a clue either, and they’d certainly tell us if she did, because how else would I trust them enough not to hound them with the exact same question for the entire day?”

“Patience, Aries, is a virtue,” Libra told him. As was the norm for the lead Gatherer, her poker face was terrible. “And surprises are the spice of life.”

Aries cocked an eyebrow. Somewhere nearby, a volcano erupted, the heat from its blast scorching Leo’s skin. “Think I’ve said before that Hunters don’t like surprises.”

Now Libra’s brow was twitching too. “Think you said before that you trusted me.” Her eyes dipped towards his shimmering, sparkling hooves. “Or do you always show off like that for a girl with something you want?”

Aries looked down as well, and his handsome bravado softened under a sheepish grin. He closed his eyes for a moment, and the tiny arcs of electricity flitting all across his body fizzled and winked out, their presence symbolic of his mastery over the element. Not to mention, probably a pretty good explanation for that whole “otherworldly light” deal.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” he said once his power was no longer on display. “I’m always ready for action.”

“I take it that means ‘yes’.”

Aries shook his head, his face split by a grin and his eyes still twinkling with barely constrained energy. “Beats me why you’d ever want to join the Hunters, Leo,” he said to the costumed mare still sitting nearby. Her posture was slumped and somewhat awkwardly positioned, as if her hind legs had simply given out and she hadn’t quite gotten around to noticing yet. “Long hours, no hazard pay, and you still gotta deal with smartflanks like her the second you get home. Anypony who tosses their helmet into that ring’s as crazy as I am.”

“Ha. Yeah,” Leo mumbled, her jaw loose against her chest and her eyes leveled directly at Aries’s. “I’m crazy.”

“Virgo and I agreed we’d wait until the whole group was together before we announced the result of the meeting,” Libra said. “And barring the off-chance she foresaw her own demise this morning, I’d assume she isn’t far behind you. You’ll get your answers soon enough. And I promise I’ll take good care of you if the extra few seconds of waiting makes you feel faint.”

“Not with you for a nursemaid, it won’t,” Aries jabbed back, but once Libra retreated to join her fellow Gatherer Capricorn near the gatehouse where the former of the pair always kept watch, he didn’t hold a grudge. Instead, he just gave a conciliatory shrug and sat down to relax against the frame of the gate, pulling at the straps of his breastplate until the whole thing slipped off his shoulders and joined his helmet on the ground next to him. Reluctantly, Leo tore her eyes away from the spectacle—and oh Terra below, was it a spectacle—and forced herself to focus on the ancient road outside the front gate that wound all the way down to the foot of the mountain and, somewhere on it, was still carrying Virgo back home.

Sure enough, the snow-white head Huntress and co-leader of the Zodiac walked into view only a hundred and sixty-seven seconds later. Leo had counted each one, falling back on the one thing she knew would get her mind off Aries and onto the objectively more important matter that would soon be at hoof—the peace treaty between the three tribes of mortal ponies that had now permanently settled mere miles away from Oasis, in the fertile valley beneath the snow-capped peaks of what the tribes and the Zodiac both called the Unicorn Range.

Just a few months prior, the tribes had all lived comfortably, if not exactly peacefully, in the woodlands just north of Galloping Gorge. The earth ponies tilled the soil and grew crops plentiful enough to feed the entire territory, and the remaining two tribes repaid them as best they could: the pegasi with their control over the weather, and the unicorns with their skilled laborers and the scientific and technological advances of Princess Platinum’s esteemed magicians and scholars.

And then, sequestered away in Oasis atop the highest mountain peak in Terra, there were the Zodiac, the immutable glue that bound the whole messy conglomeration together. There were twelve of them—eight of the earth race and two each from pegasus and unicorn—and each one was endowed with preternatural powers reaching far beyond those of a normal stallion or mare, the least of which was immortality. Some ponies saw them as gods, others as representatives of various moral ideals, but most just respected them as exactly the thing their more common title implied: Guardians. The keepers of the peace. The first, last, and best defense for ponykind against all the monsters, demons, beasts and burdens that roamed the land around them, not to mention the anything-but-civil disputes that always cropped up between the tribes any time the Zodiac had more than ten seconds to rest between battles.

It had almost seemed like a cruel cosmic joke when the blizzard came, like the last and biggest rug the universe could yank out from underneath the single dozen souls trying to keep it all from falling apart. The pain had only been made so fresher by the fact that somehow, for once in their entire span of existence, the tribes’ antipathy towards their rivals had seemingly begun to thaw out just before it happened. At times, their behavior towards each other had almost bordered on civility. But the more that new golden standard glittered, the more the Zodiac knew it couldn’t stay. The spring equinox sun rose and set on fields buried under snow two ponies tall in places, and with the famine that soon followed came a bitter tribal feud that came a few testy words short of escalating into civil war.

That would’ve been plenty enough to deal with on its own even without the second problem, the fight Scorpio and a thoroughly frustrated Virgo bitingly called “The Everywhere Front”. The harsh winter had cut the pony tribes deep, and in the months that followed, it seemed like every nasty creature within two hundred miles had come running the second they smelled blood in the snow. Ice wraiths, frost-giants, and vicious sabertooth packs from the north, nightshades and centaurs from the east, a baffling southern alliance between the fire eagles and the Timberwolves—at least that had been simple to deal with—all of which paled in comparison to the three-hundred foot chimera who kicked a hole through the Unicorn Range that still hadn’t stopped smoking. And that wasn’t even counting the Windigos, arcane horse-like creatures that migrated south with the storm and literally fed on the bounty of anger and hatred that the tribal disputes so generously provided them.

The campaign to keep ponykind safe, sound, and acceptably sane had left the whole group battered, bruised, and just about ready to pack up Oasis and find a new civilization to be patron gods and goddesses for—and that was before the entire equine race had just up and skipped off to go exploring out into the wild foggy white yonder. Everypony had grown sick of waiting for the blizzard to clear up on its own, so each tribe had bravely set out to resettle and reform their once-proud nation in a new land. As in, a single, solitary plot of land about twenty miles due southeast, sitting smack dab in the middle of monster-infested territory and simultaneously warred over by all three tribes, all of whom laid claim to the region under the age-old convention of “I totally saw it first”.

And yet in the end, through some inexplicable means, it had all somehow worked out. The relentless onslaught of the demonic beasts of Hades and other such local wildlife tapered out with the coming of the summer solstice, and by the time the soil thawed, the tribes had agreed to live together instead of dying off alone. That wasn’t to say life had been a breeze since then; disorganized remnants of the winter hordes still prowled the countryside, and while the tribes weren’t trying to kill each other anymore, they also weren’t exactly friends yet. It had taken several weeks to get to this point, where a loop around the tribes’ territory ended with only one brief enemy encounter and the news coming from Princess Platinum’s new castle in the valley was increasingly good. Maybe today would bring the moment they’d been waiting for. Maybe today would be the beginning of the end.

Virgo took her time getting from the path up to where Libra stood inside the front courtyard, never quickening her stately pace even as the rumor mill spun on either side.

“Week’s worth of armor cleaning duty says it’s another speech on being steadfast and noble,” Scorpio hissed at Aries.

“Two weeks says the treaty’s finally done,” he murmured back. “They wouldn’t be dragging it out like this otherwise.”

“It’s Virgo, for Pete’s sake. She’s a precognitive, democratically elected leader. She drags everything out.”

“Y’know, there’s this thing Aries and I like to do called ‘being optimistic’,” Sagittarius whispered with a slight nod of his head, his eyes still locked on Virgo. “You should try it sometime.”

“Y’know, there’s this thing I prefer called ‘being realistic’. You should try that sometime,” Scorpio hissed back. “Two weeks.”

Aries spit into his sole, and Scorpio did the same. “Done,” he said as their hooves quietly tapped together.

“Hay with it, I want in too,” Sagittarius complained.

“Then ante up, slick,” answered Scorpio.

“I’ll see his armor cleaning and raise you a crate of Cheerywine. If I win, I want your ward anklet.”

“You drive a hard bargain.”

“Said the realist to the optimist.”

Scorpio grimaced, then sealed the deal with Sagittarius too. Meanwhile, Virgo and Libra seemed to finally be ready to end the suspense.

“Are we all met?” Virgo asked.

Most of the assembled ponies nodded, but one only put on a puzzled look. “Hang on a second,” Cancer spoke up. “I think we’re still miss-”

“Waaaiiit!”

Eleven heads swiveled around towards the courtyard, whose most prominent feature now was a lime-green unicorn mare running hell-bent for leather from the general direction of the Nursery. “Sorry, sorry,” Pisces gasped as she stumbled to a halt next to Cancer, her frazzled cerulean mane infested with several songbirds and at least one squirrel. “Sunset. Daydreaming. Lost track of time. Sprinted all the way here. Tunnel vision. Can’t breathe.”

She pressed her lips shut and swallowed hard. “We’re good,” she finished weakly. Scorpio and Cancer both rolled their eyes, but the latter’s sour expression was quick to sweeten up. As the shape-shifter held out a hoof for a couple of Pisces’s canaries to hop onto, Virgo straightened her posture and turned to address the gathered crowd.

“I suppose there’s no need to remind you all of the significance the past several weeks’ events bear on the future of this continent,” she began. One might’ve thought she were putting on airs with her regal demeanor and stately tone of voice, but that was really just typical Virgo. “For centuries, our order has protected and upheld the spirit of friendship and harmony in ponykind, and in doing so we have served as the first and foremost line of defense against any and all enemies that might try to disrupt it, whether they be monsters of land, sea, air, or even the mind. We have accepted this duty because we are those most capable of fulfilling it, because we knew there were none of mortal flesh and blood who could do the same without sacrificing much more than any living creature could afford to lose.”

“She’s stalling...” Scorpio murmured. Aries shot her a glare and mouthed, “Be quiet,” and she made a face before obeying. Sagittarius, meanwhile, hardly even glanced her way.

“But in the face of overwhelming peril that even we could not fully overcome, the pegasus, unicorn, and earth ponies of the three tribes proved us wrong,” Virgo went on. “When the very earth they inhabited cracked and shattered beneath their hooves, they banded together and persevered with strength and fervor that we ourselves might be wise to aspire towards. And now, with their search for a new home concluded and our campaign to ease their journey victorious, they have set out in pursuit of the most elusive and most essential element of peace there is: unmitigated, permanent unification, for the continued success of their species and the greater good of all who call it their own.”

Even though Scorpio’s cocky grin was growing, the look in her eyes was far from content. Even if she won her bet with Aries and Sagittarius, another day without a resolution of the unification talks meant another day of traipsing all over the continent making sure nothing got through to the central city where the negotiations were being held, another day of dragging out a guerrilla campaign that was somehow even more exhausting than the all-out war that had preceded it, another day of wondering whether the question of if the tentative peace would crumble apart was really a question of when.

“This transition, as Libra and I anticipated, has been far from simple. Compromise is a somewhat novel concept for these ponies, and though we have done our best to encourage them to see reason, this leg of their journey is one they must ultimately complete on their own. As long as the talks have persisted, we have been vigilant in our duty to watch over them and keep them safe from watch, and in light of the events that have occurred in the negotiations today, all I can really say is...”

Virgo sighed, ran her tongue briskly over her lips, and paused for what seemed like an eternity. Then, to the surprise of almost everyone in attendance, the erudite, straitlaced leader of the Huntress broke character and smiled.

“We’re out of a job,” she said.

The world held its breath as the meaning of her words sank in, and then before everypony could start talking at once, Scorpio beat them all to the punch.

“You gotta be kiddin’ me,” she groaned in utter disbelief. Aries burst out laughing, seemingly half from joy and half from seeing the look on Scorpio’s face, and Sagittarius did his best to avoid smirking but still ended up looking more than a little smug.

“You know, if you think about it, you really didn’t even need a protection ward in the first place,” he told her, genuine sympathy mostly overpowering his winner’s bravado.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Scorpio said again, this time almost shouting the words as if the extra volume would somehow make them true. The black look in her eyes when she saw Sagittarius’s cocked brow would’ve melted a lesser stallion down to liquified carbon and a small puddle of fear sweat, but Sagittarius simply stretched out his leg and accepted the rune-inscribed metal band Scorpio pulled off her forehoof and slapped resentfully into his.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” he said cheerfully.

“Zip it, featherhead,” his defeated partner spat back just before Libra called out for everypony’s attention again. Even though the rest of the group quieted down quickly, Leo’s heart was still racing fit to burst inside her chest. She’d been so busy watching Aries and the other Hunters and silently mouthing her own responses to their playful banter, she had hardly even thought about what this really meant. The monsters were vanquished. The tribes had signed the peace treaty. The war was truly, finally over.

“All right, guys, I know you’re excited and you absolutely should be, but there’s still a few other things we need to go over before we go off losing our heads and wasting all of Capricorn’s champagne,” Libra said, her voice still raised a little bit and the corners of her mouth twitching. “And just in case Scorpio sees fit to serenade us again with her incredibly pertinent question: yes, I promise we’re not kidding.”

Once everypony was done chuckling and Scorpio had elaborately mimed where Libra could stick her next clever remark, she continued. “Just to go ahead and clear things up, the tribes have indeed signed a peace treaty and come together as a bona fide nation. As of about ninety minutes ago, we’re living in the penthouse suite of the unified Republic of Equestria, which officially covers all of the territory from the Crystal Mountains to the edge of the Everfree Forest.”

The racket from before returned in force, and Libra had to shout the next sentence of her spiel. “However,” she said, “that doesn’t mean we’re completely out of the woods just yet. The tribes are united now and, thank all creation, not arguing over which race among them deserves the most apples versus oranges anymore, but the republic is young and, quite frankly, not something anypony down in Te... ‘scuse me, down in Equestria has any real idea how to govern or maintain. So while all you Hunters probably won’t be knocking as many heads together in the next year or so, you will be helping the soon-to-be-elected officials down in the capital of New Platinum establish a basic system of law and order within the city limits, and later on in the outlying districts the earth ponies will probably migrate out into.”

She turned towards the group of Hunters Leo still had one eye on. “Sage, one of the stipulations the pegasi fought for was that they were allocated some territory for their own cloud city, so you and I are gonna have to pop in there about a week from now as well. We’ll mostly just be on overwatch to make sure they’re not straying too near the boundaries laid out in the treaty, but since Commander Hurricane’s first priority will no doubt be to centralize his military power, you’ll probably wanna poke your head in sometime and give him a fellow combat vet to bounce ideas off of.”

Sagittarius nodded, and Libra’s gaze swept over the rest of the Zodiac, pausing on Leo at least once. “As for my fellow Gatherers, we’ve got, dare I say, the more important job. While the Hunters are handling security, we’re going to be handling the daily trials and tribulations of everyday life. The earth ponies should be fairly self-sufficient, but the unicorns and any stray pegasi who decide to take a stab at provincial life are gonna have a pretty rough time of it out there. Food, water, basic goods and services, leisure activities... anything that’ll make life in Equestria livable, we’re gonna take the reins on. Sound good?”

A chorus of enthusiastic answers met her open-ended question, and a prideful glow lit up behind Libra’s eyes. “This is our victory just as much as theirs, you guys. I’m not much of a poet, so I can’t even begin to describe how proud Virgo and I are of how you all kept your heads high even when it seemed like this whole mess was never going to get cleaned up. I’m going to ask for more of the same from you come tomorrow morning, but as far as tonight goes, enjoy yourselves. You’ve earned it.”

Libra trailed off, and the expectant silence lent a tinge of electric anticipation to the courtyard. “All right,” she sighed a few moments later. “Now you can freak out.”

And now came the second shock of the evening: of all ponies, Taurus was the first one to let loose a bellowing war whoop, tossing Leo up in the air and catching her on his back with her ears still ringing. The rest of the Hunters copied him in a heartbeat, and soon everypony in sight had erupted into riotous celebration. Bouncing up and down on Taurus’s back as he galloped towards the Great Hall, Leo closed her eyes and let her imagination bloom inside the colorless darkness. Someday, she would be the one tearing along a dozen steps ahead of the sedate, submissive Gatherers. Someday, she would stay up till the crack of dawn swapping war stories and jeering at each other like only old soldiers could. Someday, she would be the conquering hero returning home to raucous cheers like the ones echoing around her.

Someday. Someday she would earn her place among the Hunters, but not today. Today, they were going to celebrate.

Today, everything was perfect.

Chapter 2: Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick...

At some point in their lives, all ponies learn that it’s usually best to look on the bright side of life. The gold-coated pegasus gliding lazily over the Everfree Forest hadn’t yet reached that point, partially because she’d never had what you’d call a “positive attitude”, but mostly because she’d never really ever been “alive” to begin with. In light of the day’s events, though, she thought she might give it a try. So far, it wasn’t too bad.

Her first few hours back in corporeal form hadn’t been perfect by any means, but when she thought about it, they had definitely had their perks. The sky was dark and thick with clouds, the air crackled with the metallic scent of an oncoming storm, and all things considered, she was going to make it to the Fortress of the Four in pretty good time.

And of course, she couldn’t leave out the detour she’d had to make this go-around, a quick visit to a caravan of earth pony settlers shipping out from who knew where towards who cared what. She had a good reason for stopping by, too. One of the younger ones had seen her flying overhead, and it seemed unprofessional just to leave them be. What was the little brat’s name, again? Somepony had screamed it during her impromptu social call. Fun Bash? Corn Mash?

Thunderflash. That was it. Well, by this point Thunder Ash was probably a better name. Geez, that forest had burned good. She hadn’t had so much fun setting something on fire since… well, since the last time she’d set something on fire. Guess you don’t realize how much you miss things unless you go a few thousand years without them, she’d thought once or twice that day.

But what with how downright perky she was feeling, the time she’d lost barely even registered in her mind. It didn’t matter how long she’d been gone. She was back now, baby, along with one of her oldest and deadliest allies, who seemed to be feeling a bit moody today if his chosen form—an undulating cloud of black smoke that had no distinguishing features and yet still managed to look angry—was anything to go by. For some reason, he’d been following her around ever since they’d found themselves back in Terra surrounded by a scorched expanse of shattered rock, the acidic scent of ozone still fading away from the lightning bolt that had delivered them back into the mortal plane.

Come to think of it, though, that was completely normal for him. The most rage-filled, earth-shattering, absurdly powerful killing machine the universe had ever known, and yet when it came to figuring out where to unleash his fury, he was like a little lost puppy: always looking for somepony to point him in the right direction. In retrospect, there were worse fates than having the embodiment of the term “unholy wrath” at your every beck and call.

As it turned out, though, both of them were heeding the same order at the moment: an instinctual pressure in their guts—or what passed for them now, anyway—pulling them towards the apex of the incantation that had dragged them back into the realm of the living. Hopefully, the dork who’d summoned them all this time would know a bit more about what he was doing. The last one had skipped a few steps and was already spread across several of the fortress’s walls by the time she had reached him. Cloudy over here said he was like that when he got there too. She had never forgiven him for not saving her a couple bites.

Predictably, the only member of their group waiting outside the Fortress when she and Cloudy arrived was Big Brother. He hated being called that, so she made a point of calling him nothing else. She didn’t care how many millions of years went by; watching his head spin off into the stratosphere would never stop being hilarious.

“You’re late,” he grumbled as she came in for a hard but still mostly controlled landing, folding her wings delicately along her back and hopping out of the deep fissure she’d just smashed open inside the main castle’s front steps. He had fallen back on his default form this go-around: reddish-maroon coat, good-sized unicorn horn, flowing bronze mane that looked about as oily as the black marble beneath his hooves, and a cutie mark of an opened eye that matched his own dull brown ones perfectly. She, on the other hoof, preferred a lighter, more mobile build, as opposed to Cloudy, who tended to not care who or what looked at him as long as they ended their encounter deader than they started.

“Got chested up by a few diggers out in the boonies,” she explained, shaking the rubble out of her mane and flashing him a distinctly red-tinged grin. “You know how it is, Big Brother.”

“Unfortunately, I do,” he cut back with acid in his voice. His eyes and his cutie mark burned like rubies now. “And I’m not your brother.”

“Technically, we’re all related if you look at it sideways. So yeah, you kinda are.”

Big Brother sighed and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. When he opened them again a moment ago, their irises had dried out into a misty gray color. “Get inside,” he continued, his attention now directed towards the disgruntled puff next to her. “And at least try to look normal for once.”

As Big Brother turned to leave, Cloudy grew a wispy set of legs and contorted himself into a roughly pony-like shape, which eventually solidified into an actual pony with a grey coat, unkempt black mane, and green-tinted eyes with irises that glowed and shimmered like the embers of a dormant fire. The horn atop his head glimmered red and orange as well, and streaks of wispy purple smoke seeped out of the corners of his eyes and floated back past his ears. "Normal", it seemed, held a slightly different meaning for this particular harbringer of death.

“Aw, can’t you let him express himself, Big Bro?” his pegasus partner cooed in a manner that was sure to infuriate everypony within earshot. “He’s so adorable when he’s just a bitty wittle waincwoud. And hey, if he goes gonzo again, all we gotta do is hope for a good breeze.”

The pony formerly known as Cloudy grew to nearly twice his previous size in an instant, his mane whipping around in a nonexistent gale. “Oh, cool it, Sparky,” she added in a deadpan a moment later. “No one’s impressed.”

Now Not-So-Cloudy was three times as big, a feat that his tormentor reacted to with a yawn and a cock-eyed smirk. A glare from Big Brother quickly brought both of them back down to earth, though, and with varying degrees of reluctance they both followed him into the cavernous main hall of the Fortress of the Four.

Even in the nearly complete darkness inside the foyer, four other diversely-sized equine shapes were still visible in various parts of the room. So everypony else had decided to show up early too. Fine by her. If time had ever held any real weight to her, it would’ve been the kind of weight that could be easily ignored until she felt it was time for her to start bothering to carry it.

“Even Acedia beat you here this time,” Big Brother said with a smirk, using the archaic name for his fellow Vice like he was prone to do way too often. “Those diggers from the boonies must’ve had quite the chests on them.”

“Hey, Big Brother, you see this?” the pegasus replied, forcing a lethargic expression onto her face without much difficulty. “This is me giving a—”

“Where is he?”

Both she and Big Brother turned towards the third member of their party, the one who hadn’t uttered anything more complex than a snarl the entire day. “Where is he?” the colossal approximation of a stallion said again, his eyes narrowed into beady red slits. Nobody asked who he was talking about; there was only one pony he could be talking about, and he was the only reason they were all here in the first place.

“Summoner?” Big Brother called out. His voice reverberated twice inside the massive hall, and neither time was it accompanied by any kind of response. And as confident and unflappable as they both usually were, the pegasus couldn’t help but share a curious glance with him. Every past Summoner had been pretty close to insufferable for how swelled their heads were over their magical prowess. The last thing any of them would’ve wanted to do was hide from the greatest evidence of their might ever seen by ponykind. So where in Hades was this one?

“If the pony or beast who summoned us is here now, I bid you come forward!” Big Brother shouted. This time, his voice was loud enough to echo three times, and when it made its third trip back past his ears, a disembodied chuckle followed closely behind.

“Bid me, you say?” a deep, nasal, and thoroughly amused voice asked. As the seven ponies visible in the room looked around fruitlessly for the eighth, the Summoner laughed again, his outburst sounding more a cackle now. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t you supposed to be under my command?”

Ah, now that was more like the Summoners they all knew and loathed. And that was more like Big Brother to be the only one of them all who still let their pretentiousness get under his skin. “Our only desire is to serve you, Summoner,” he answered in an undertone.

The Summoner snorted again. His voice sounded closer now. “Oh, you’re just saying that to get on my good side, you tease...”

Then again, maybe Big Brother was smarter than he let on. “Enough with the semantics! Show yourself!” the pegasus shouted, stepping up to stand defiantly by Big Brother’s side. Only a couple feet of space separated the two of them, and she paid the gap no mind until, out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the air inside it begin to shimmer. Before she could so much as turn her head, the shimmer condensed into a tiny bubble, which promptly exploded into a cloud of purple smoke with a deafening pop. Within moments, the smoke swirled back into a ball and disappeared, leaving behind a chocolate-brown unicorn with a stubby black mane and a bushy goatee.

“A fair request, my mercurial little hellspawn,” he loudly proclaimed, leaning hard up against her as if they were just the absolute best of friends. The second she started winding up to sock him in the jaw he vanished again, twin bangs and smoke puffs announcing his transferral from her side to about an inch in front of her nose.

“And one I’m all too happy to oblige,” he added. He spent a moment considering her green-eyed, livid gaze, then cocked his brow and flashed her the best manure-eating grin she’d ever seen on a mortal’s mug.

“You must be Greed,” he said. “Word on the street is you’re just irresistible.”

“Is that so?” she intoned back.

The Summoner pursed his lips and gave a knowing nod, then tilted his head to the side to look behind her. “And I take it the big ol’ ray of sunshine melting a hole in my parlor floor back here is Wrath. Love what you’ve done with your mane. Really brings out the uncontrollable murderous rage in your complexion.”

As Wrath scuffed at the floor and snorted, the Summoner turned to Big Brother. “Pride, of course, a personal favorite of mine. And then if I’m not mistaken, that leaves Lust, Envy, Gluttony and...”

He trailed off, and the whole group turned towards the last pony in the row. Every one of them had complete control over their physical constitutions, and their preferred forms usually reflected their namesakes. Lust was deep maroon, long-horned, and all curves and well-toned muscle; Envy was predictably a nauseating shade of green; and Gluttony was the rough size, shape, and consistency of a four-foot tall jelly donut. And then there was Sloth, the one the Summoner was looking at now, whose standard form was that of a teensy little earth filly with a bubble-gum pink mane that hung down to a luxuriously long length over a midnight-blue coat. The Summoner himself perhaps said it best after a moment’s pause:

“Well, to each their own.”

Now the Summoner made his way up onto the central dias at the rear of the hall, though this time he traveled at a more natural trot. Once he arrived, he wheeled himself around and faced the gathered crowd in front of him, and Greed couldn’t resist the urge to roll her eyes. Right on schedule: the Summoner Monologue.

“And there we are,” he began. “Seven fearsome fiends of old. The infamous Seven Deadly Vices, restored to glory for the first time in centuries. In the thousands of years since this world first belched out life, you seven were the greatest terror that ever stalked it. Once, ponykind trembled in fear of your might. Once, they lived for you, worshipped you, hopelessly toiled away in pursuit of whatever your metaphorically black hearts desired.”

He paused, and the gaze that he swept over his summoned subjects took on a disapproving air. “Clearly, you’ve fallen on some hard times.”

Unsurprisingly, neither Pride nor Wrath took that last remark on the chin. “You seem quite confident in your knowledge of our history,” the former of the two grumbled.

“Well, excuse me for doing my homework,” the Summoner replied. Greed couldn’t tell whether he sounded frustrated or offended. “It’s not every day you get complete, unquestioning control over six avatars of pure evil and one giant black smoldering, uh...”

The Summoner trailed off and shook his head, his hoof still hovering in mid-gesture and pointed in the general direction of Wrath. “I’m sorry, it’s driving me crazy. Are you a mare or a stallion? Actually, do you guys even have genders, or is it just kind of an androgynous thing?”

Pride grit his teeth, but said nothing. That was Pride for you, all right: he’d preen himself and spit acid for a while, and probably hold a permanent grudge against the Summoner to boot, but he’d never go so far as to attack his enemies himself. That responsibility was left to guys like Wrath, whose first and only reaction to everything was “Kill it” or, if that didn’t work, “Kill it harder.”

Judging by his reaction here, he seemed to have skipped straight to the second plan: with an ear-splitting roar, he exploded up from the ground in a maelstrom of ash and fire, giant blobs of lava spraying the walls and sizzling against the now thoroughly abused stone. The Summoner’s only response was to blink slowly and thread his upper lip between his teeth, which only made the whole spectacle that much better for Greed. There had many a Summoner in the last few millennia, and all of them tended to have this funny little belief that the physical embodiments of disharmony and chaos would just line up in front of them like good little soldiers, ready to follow their every command without so much as a daydream of resisting.

Problem was, they never seemed to read the fine print in the spell tomes: the Seven were obligated to obey their Summoner, but only so long as he gave them a direct order. And if there was one thing Greed loved to find, it was loopholes like that. So instead of jumping to the Summoner’s aid, she just sat back and watched as Wrath bellowed again and bore down on the unsuspecting mortal below. She’d been too late to the party to watch this last time they’d popped up on Earth, and she didn’t want to miss a second of it now. This moron wouldn’t even have time to scream before Wrath ripped him into bite-sized chunks.

Except Wrath didn’t rip him into bite-sized chunks. In fact, Wrath never even touched the Summoner at all. His jagged, bared teeth were only inches from the mortal’s skull when they crashed into something strong enough not just to repel him, but to stop him dead in his tracks and send the rest of his non-corporeal form piling up behind him, pouring over the invisible barrier surrounding the noticeably unshredded Summoner. A chorus of gasps rang out from the other six Vices, and after waiting a moment for Wrath’s eyes to refocus, he opened his mouth to speak.

“Okay,” he said with an understanding nod. “Guess that’s a touchy subject.”

• • •

Leo had never been a big fan of drinking. She wasn’t a prude or anything; she totally would drink if everybody else was, and probably could handle it pretty well if she did. It was the drinks themselves she didn’t like: all those bubbles crackling in her throat and floating around in her stomach like she was a balloon ready to pop. Every sip from the gleaming glass bottle in front of her made her eyes water and her lips pinch together, but she kept taking more and more anyway. If all the Hunters were knocking back shots like tenpins, they couldn’t really be that bad.

“So okay, you... y-you remember this, right, Aries?” Scorpio shouted, half because she tended to be a bit exuberant when she was drunk, and half just to make herself heard over the thunderous noise around her. Although the Great Hall in Oasis was big enough for five hundred ponies, the twelves various gods and goddesses crowded around its one and only table now felt more than big enough to fill the room. They’d all piled inside earlier as one giddy mass, but soon enough they’d instinctively separated themselves out into their normal positioning around the table.

Virgo and Libra sat at either end, the former buried in a deep discussion of governmental policy with a mostly silent Taurus, and the latter trying not to snort cider out of her nose as Gemini, Capricorn, and Pisces elaborately mimed an encounter they’d had with a particularly depressed weeping willow that morning. Scorpio sat on Virgo’s other side across from Taurus, but she was far too busy swapping old war stories with Aries and drinking away her sorrows at losing her bet with him to care about whatever their leader was saying.

The other winner in their wager had tossed out a good-natured joke at Scorpio's expense every now and then, but for the most part Sagittarius seemed content to just stew in his own thoughts between Taurus and Aquarius, his hoof lazily hooked around a bottle of the Cheerywine Scorpio'd spent the first hour of the meal wistfully staring at. Leo herself, meanwhile, sat across from Aquarius, every so often glancing at Cancer off to her right but mostly keeping her attention locked in on Aries, who at the moment was pointing a wobbly glare at Scorpio while balancing a heavy wooden flagon in the crook of his ankle.

“I remember you abandoning me to handle fifteen lich lords by myself because you had to take a leak,” he said, the slur in his words evidence that he had very much appreciated Sage’s offer to share his stock with him in honor of their victory.

Scorpio waved him off with an uncoordinated gesture that would’ve sent Virgo’s plate flying had she not moved it just out of reach thirty seconds before. “Buck off, that’s not important.”

“The not-important part’s that you freakin’ left me in a war zone by myself?”

“I came back!” Sagittarius cracked a grin, and Scorpio raised her voice again over Aries’ protests. “Yes, I did, I came back, and that’s what you gotta remember, right?”

Aries grunted his disagreement and raised his glass, tapping it against his forehead right before downing its contents with a grimace. As his cup clunked back on the table, Leo wrapped her lips around her own bottle and tilted it up. By sheer force of will, she managed not to choke and gulped down the flood of liquid burning on her tongue.

“So the rest of the team’s stuck cleaning up behind us, and I’m down to my last Cherry Bomb,” Scorpio went on, referring to the explosives Aquarius had built them for that battle whose names were a bit of a misnomer in light of their strength. “And thanks to Ari being clever enough to get himself surrounded in the middle of a twenty-yard deep valley, I’m a bit low on options. So I, being of sound body and—ahem—incredibly sound mind, came up with a plan.”

“Right, yeah, I remember this part too,” Aries muttered. “Think I still have the scars from this part, actually.”

Scorpio, being apparently of not-so-sound hearing, ignored him. “I go full-armored, dive over the edge and land right on the lead one’s back.” She reached out and slapped over a cup she’d emptied a few minutes earlier. “Boom! He’s down. Two on either side—” She pointed her hoof at her neck, then jerked it to the side as if she were slicing at it with a blade. “—history. Now the rest of them see me. I back myself up, take down a couple but leave the rest thinking they’ve got me cornered, and then...”

The table shuddered as Scorpio’s coat flushed black and morphed into overlapping plates of rock-hard armor. Now even Libra was paying attention, though the look on her face was far from impressed. “I light the fuse,” she finished with a grin that looked positively malicious on her now unrecognizable face. “Game over. Lich parts everywhere.”

“Along with some Ari parts,” Aries commented into his echoing cup, “but I digress.”

“You were fifteen feet away!”

“From a bomb with a range of twenty.”

“Minor detail,” Scorpio said with another slightly more contained wave.

“Yeah, well, stop by my room later,” Aries shot back. “See how minor you think my detail is then.”

Taurus jerked in his seat as Scorpio choked on her drink and sprayed mead all over him, flicking the droplets left on her hooves back at Aries as the rest of the table whooped and laughed—Leo loudest of all. The next sip she took from her mug barely fit in her mouth, and she slipped into a coughing fit that wouldn’t let up even after the rest of the group had quieted down again.

“You all right there, Leo?” Aries asked her. Her eyes blurry and her throat searing in pain, Leo nodded as fast as she could.

“Yep,” she croaked. “You’re just funny and, uh... n-not minor.”

Scorpio snorted again, Aries cracked a grin, and at least ninety-five percent of Leo’s body went numb. “Appreciate the sentiment,” he said, lifting his mug to his lips again before narrowing his eyes into a scowl. “Aw, son of a...”

“You dry too?” Scorpio asked, her empty cup overturned on the table and her tone now similarly glum.

“Yeah,” Aries replied. Now he turned towards Capricorn, the Zodiac’s resident gardening expert and full-time chef. “Hey, Cap, is the cellar still stocked?”

“Uh... should be,” she replied, taking a moment to dislodge her mind from the conversation she’d been having before.

“Awesome. So, uh, hate to be a bother or anything, but you think you could pop down there real quick and grab us another bot—”

“I got it!”

The whole table turned to look at Leo, whose until now hadn’t quite realized how loudly she had just shouted her offer. “I mean, y’know,” she added, shaking off their curious stares with a casual glance down at the edge of her forehoof. “If no one else wants to.”

Out of the corner of her lowered eyes, she could Scorpio and Aries both wearing twin knowing smirks, and the intoxicating warmth fizzing in her stomach began to flush into her face. Thankfully, Virgo stepped in before too long to deflect some of the heat.

“Think I’ll go with her,” she said. “Stretch my legs a bit.”

“And then try to go shot for shot with us?” Aries added, his voice a mix of standard ribbing and honest hopefulness. Virgo smiled, and shot him down with an air of practiced efficiency.

“Some of us have better uses for our weapons,” she said. Without so much as flinching at the second round of hooting and hollering that spread across the table, she neatly folded her napkin over her spotless plate and beckoned for Leo to follow her, the noise in the Hall cutting out the instant they rounded the corner into the hallway outside.

“Thanks for the help,” Leo murmured once they were out of Aries’ earshot.

“You’re not the only one in there who needed it,” Virgo answered, but aside from a shrug and a gentle smile, Leo got nothing else out of her. After wasting a few moments trying to puzzle out what she’d meant, she gave up with a shrug of her own and followed Virgo down the darkened cellar stairs.

She had more important things to think about. She couldn’t depend on Virgo to bail her out next time. Next time she had Aries’ attention like that, she couldn’t fumble it away like a nervous little mortal girl. She was one of the Zodiac, just as much as he was. She had to be calm. Collected. Confident.

And cool. She absolutely, positively had to be cool.

• • •

Swathed in flames and choking black smog, Wrath barked with fury and charged at the Summoner’s shield again, but to no avail. While he occupied the attention of the rest of the hall’s occupants, Greed took a moment to push her jaw back up and gather her thoughts. With the right magical spell, of course, there was always a more foolproof way to shield yourself from physical and arcane attacks, but there was only one spell powerful enough to do it against the unbridled power of a ticked-off Vice. This guy had done his homework.

And even now, he didn’t so much as flinch as Wrath continued to beat himself stupid against the intangible barricade. It was as if he had been prepared for this, as if he had known exactly how each and every one of them would react to his presence. The other Summoners had been simple. This Summoner was something else.

It took Wrath a full minute before he pulled back and gave up, reduced by the Summoner’s ancient protective magic to nothing more than a furious glare peering out from inside a roiling black cloud. A few moments later, he collected himself back into equine form and trod forward to where he had met resistance before. He did no better at reaching the Summoner like that than he had with the full brunt of his power; his tentatively raised forehoof moved freely through the air until it was about a foot from the Summoner’s nose, at which point it bounced off the still indiscernible barrier between them with an audible clunk. He put his hoof down, and glared again.

“Are you quite finished?” the Summoner asked.

Wrath drew in a long, heavy breath through his nose, but it came out as a snort rather than a bellow. The big beast lumbered over to the side of the room to sulk, and the Summoner cleared his throat.

“Well, then,” he said, his tone so cheerful and innocent that it was easy to believe that his near-death experience had already slipped his mind. “Now that we’re all acquainted, let’s get down to business, shall we? I presume you’re all aware of at least how you’re here: namely, I completed the ancient ritual, called you forth from the cursed ground you infected, sold my soul for eternal power and glory...”

The Summoner’s gaze drifted off the ceiling, and he waved himself along with his hoof. “Yadda yadda yadda, and so on and so forth. Point is, I’m in charge here, so let’s go ahead and lay down a few ground rules before we...”

His gaze shifted over to Wrath again, just long enough to catch the tail end of a simmering leer. “... have any more disagreements.”

Pride caught Wrath’s attention and subtly shook his head, and Greed saw no reason to argue the point. The others had certainly been caught off guard, and she couldn’t really deny that she had been too. But more than being scared or confused, she was curious. Who was this mortal? And exactly how had he become so powerful without the Zodiac taking notice?

Once he saw there was no dissent amongst the Vices, the Summoner continued. “First things first, that whole ‘great and powerful Summoner’ schtick? Not really my style. Unfortunately, the name bequeathed upon me at birth isn’t really my style either, so for the time being, just ‘Master’ will do fine.” He paused, looking over at Wrath once again with a much more visible glint in his eye this time. “So long as nopony’s too put out by the idea.”

Wrath snorted again, only to be restrained—barely—by a look from Pride once again. Greed, on the other side, was beginning to feel a smile curling on her face. Not only did this Summoner have power, but he liked to abuse it too. She could really see them getting along well someday.

“Secondly,” he went on as Wrath heaved for breath nearby, “and this is a kind of a long shot, but what the hay: none of you happen to know a really good parsley soup recipe, do you?”

No one answered, and Greed’s grin grew. “Perfect, because that brings me nicely into my third and final point: I’m gonna need a housekeeping crew. Luckily for you, I’ve got better things for you folks to do than run around beating rugs and changing my sheets, so my first official decree as your official lord and master is as follows.”

The Summoner—or Master now, Greed supposed—stepped down off the dias and out into the middle of the room. “There’s a little settlement of nomads about fifteen miles due...”

He spun around in a circle with his hoof outstretched, and stopped once he was pointing to a spot about two-thirds of the way down the left-side wall. “That way. I want you to pay them a visit—show some excessive force, enjoy yourselves for a bit—then come back with about, oh, let’s say ten or twelve prisoners. Any race is fine as long as there’s a couple unicorns in the bunch, and I’d prefer most of their limbs be functional, but I can work around it if things get dicey. Oh, and if any of them happens to have a penchant for the piano, that’d be just perfetto.”

By now, Greed was about ready to walk through one of the lava patches Wrath had scattered around for this beautifully sociopathic Summoner, but Pride, as always, had to be a buzzkill. “That’s it?” he said slowly, either because he wanted to make sure Master could comprehend the words, or because he himself couldn't.

“I can write it down if you want,” Master replied.

Pride squeezed his head and gave another little shake of his head. “That’s all you want us to do?”

“Well, right now, yes. I spent the whole night walking out here, I’m starving and, to be fair, I suppose I can’t imagine an immortal incarnation of mortal immorality would have any reason to know how to cook.”

Now Pride finally grew a pair and put on a glare to rival Wrath’s. “You wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble to summon us just for bits and giggles.”

The corner of Master’s mouth twitched up in time with his eyebrow. “That’s an interesting theory.”

A faint murmur wafted up from the other Vices in the back, most of the sound echoing in the cavernous space inside Pride’s slackjawed expression. Master waited for a while for Pride to grace him with a response, but soon lost his patience and filled the gap in the conversation himself.

“If you really must know, yes, I have a plan beyond breakfast tomorrow morning, and yes, it involves you all,” he said. “What you don’t need to know right now is what exactly that plan entails. All you need to worry about is precisely what I ask you to do each day.”

The next voice to pop up certainly wasn’t Pride’s. It was too loud, too strong, too thick with the kinds of things that made you want to buck an overbearing boss or schoolyard bully in the teeth. “Why don’t you tell us now?” Wrath growled.

“Because I trust you all about as far as I can throw you,” Master replied. “And you, my friend, look a bit on the heavy side.”

Wrath attacked so fast Greed almost missed it when she blinked in surprise. Sparks and droplets of molten rock flew all the way to the ceiling as the Vice threw every last bit of energy he had at breaking through Master’s magical shield, but no matter how hard he smashed into it or how loud he screamed, though, the barrier still held. In fact, it even seemed to harden a little bit; the last impact shook the very foundations of the Fortress, and left Wrath disoriented and gasping for air.

“Does he always do that, or is it just me?” Master asked the rest of the Vices, his gaze lingering mainly on Greed. She bit her lip hard and shrugged, but couldn’t regain her composure fast enough to beat Pride in being the first to speak up.

“If you don’t trust us, why should we trust you?” he asked.

“Three reasons,” Master said. “One, because of my naturally sunny disposition. Two, because you’re after limitless power and unquestioning subservience just as much as I am. And three...”

The cold, black look that radiated out from Master’s eyes and washed over the entire hall bore all the markings of a perfected art form, one that had been honed to a razor-sharp point through many other instances of terrifying other mortals into submission. It didn’t do much to set Greed quaking in her boots, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t respect another expert in the craft.

“Because as dictated by the ancient rites that facilitated your return to this homely little spectral plane I call reality, you don’t have any other choice,” he finished. He let the silence hold for exactly three seconds, then broke it with a jaunty sigh and disarming grin.

“And with that, I bid you all goodnight,” he said. “Second door on the left down the hall if you need anything.”

It might have seemed out of character for Pride not to say a word as Master swiveled on his back hooves and made for the hallway branching off from the left side of the back wall, but Greed knew better than to settle for thinking that. That look in his eyes was anything but defeated; if she knew her so-called Big Brother a tenth as well as she was sure she did, a parting shot or two couldn’t be far off. Sure enough, just as Master’s forehooves crossed the threshold of the corridor, Pride called after him, his tone calculated to be casual in the most threatening way possible.

“What about the Zodiac?”

• • •

The cellar was cramped and nearly pitch-black inside, the outlines of dusty old crates and forgotten relics of wars long past just barely visible in the thin light seeping down from the top of the stairs. The Zodiac’s preferred choice of mead—an ancient recipe of Capricorn’s made with rich, tangy honey from Pisces’s beehives—would be in one of the storage racks carved into the wall nearby, each one kept deliciously cold by the bone-chilling mountaintop rocks the shelves were carved into. Now all they needed to do was find an unopened bottle, a task that was made a good deal more difficult by the fact that neither Leo nor Virgo could see two inches in front of their nose.

“Leo, dear?” Virgo asked from somewhere off to the right. “You think you could give us a light?”

Leo nodded, only to realize a few moments later that there was no way Virgo could’ve seen her do that. “Got it,” she said, already fumbling towards the wall for the torch she knew would be bolted there. A few more moments passed in an increasingly awkward silence, and then Leo realized something else.

“Oh...” she mumbled, her face flushing with heat. “Right.”

Her cheeks growing even warmer after hearing Virgo let out a polite, satisfied cough, Leo closed her eyes—for whatever difference that made—and concentrated all of her energy into a tiny speck of light in the center of her stomach. The more she focused her strength on that little speck, the more it grew, until after a few seconds it had formed itself into a ball that kept on expanding right on out of her stomach and into her chest and legs and the tips of her ears.

She parted her lips and slowly let out the breath she’d been holding in, and freed from the confines of the ball trapped inside her guts, her pent-up energy followed the escaping air all the way out to the farthest corners of the room. By the time she breathed in again, the cellar was flooded with brilliant white light, all of it emanating from Leo’s gleaming coat and mane. She flashed Virgo a cheesy grin, and the elder pony couldn’t help but shield her eyes. She’d forgotten her teeth usually glowed as well.

“Sorry,” Leo muttered, pressing her lips tightly together as she shuffled off to find the rack where the mead was stored and told herself that she’d just imagined Virgo rolling her eyes. Even though she generally liked Virgo, and the austere-looking leader of the Hunters generally seemed to like her, it didn’t seem fair for her to be so dismissive. It wasn’t like it was really Leo’s fault she’d forgotten about her special power. She used to practice with it all the time, before the rest of the group decided they’d all be better off if Leo didn’t stay up half the night lighting up the whole mountain like a Solstice Day float.

Leo rounded the corner with her mind still busy remembering Scorpio’s boot flying at her head at four in the morning, and the rusty cuirass that soon clanged off her forehoof brought her painfully back to reality. You know, it didn’t just seem unfair; it was totally unfair. How was she ever supposed to get stronger if she couldn’t practice? This couldn’t possibly be the only thing she was capable of. Everypony in the Zodiac had some awesomely deadly special talent, even the other Gatherers. Hay, even Capricorn could enslave an entire forest to tangle up monsters in vines and stab them in the eyes with foot-long thorns, and all she ever used it for was hedge-trimming!

A sliver of golden glass glimmered in the corner of her eye, and she doubled back a few steps to stop in front of the mead rack she had nearly walked right by. They couldn’t make her give up that easily. With a little bit practice and a bit of luck, she had to be able to make them understand. After all, there must have been sometime when everypony in the Zodiac had to figure out what their power was. Maybe Aries used to just shuffle his hooves on the carpet and zap ponies when they weren’t looking. Maybe Scorpio used to morph into a polka-dotted ladybug. There was potential awesomeness lurking inside her that was just begging to be unleashed. And as soon as she figured out what it was, the scumballs and scary stuff of the world had better watch their backs.

• • •

Master passed over the threshold of the hallway and walked out of sight without breaking stride. “What about them?” he called back a second Greed was convinced he had left for good.

The corner of Pride’s lips twitched. She knew that look too: the one he got whenever he was sure the balance of power was beginning to tip his way again. “You do know about the Zodiac, don’t you?”

Master’s head poked out from behind the corner. “Rings a bell.”

Now the other corner of Pride’s mouth twitched, and then slowly rose along with its opposite to form a simpering smirk. “Well, well,” he crooned. “Seems you didn’t quite study as hard as you thought.”

Master reached out with two legs and sidestepped all the way back out into view, a weary expression making his eyes and brow droop. “If you’re truly so concerned about them, it seems you’re right,” he said. Pride’s lips parted and stayed that way as he tried to interpret his Summoner’s response, and in that extra moment of confusion, Master’s eyebrows shot back up. “I’m listening.”

Pride didn’t need any spare time to figure out the sentiment behind that remark. His gaze eyes narrowed with contempt, he explained himself with words spoken in a tone just barely above a hiss. “The Zodiac are the mortal world’s slobbering watchdogs,” he said. “They’re pretentious, empty-headed, bleeding-heart hypocrites with a lust for power and uncompromising prejudice against anything that so much as looks at them funny. The mortals worship them, let them meddle with their minds and make all their decisions for them. They pretend to be benevolent, but the peasants are just as scared of them as they should be of us.”

Master seemed, in a word, unperturbed. “Are you scared of them?”

Pride scoffed. “Of course not.”

“Good, so there’s no problem.”

For the second time in as many minutes, Pride was at a loss for words. It wasn’t until Master took his leave and headed for bed again that he finally managed to sputter out a response. “If you keep acting like they won’t sniff you out like a rotten apple before the night’s through, there sure as Hades will be!”

Master stopped in the hall threshold again, an exasperated sigh his only form of reply. “They outnumber us almost two to one, and can nearly match our strength while fully mobilized,” Pride went on, with a little more composure now that he saw he had Master’s begrudging attention. “We won’t have a problem with that, but you...”

“... will be double-checking the steps in the next phase in my plan, sipping on a nice aged Merlot and debating the pros and cons of ordering you into a frilly yellow sundress,” Master finished, without missing a beat or turning around to look at Pride. “Yank the plank out of your flank and relax. I’ve got it covered.”

That made three times now, and boy was this one a charm to watch. “You’re not going to do anything to stop them,” Pride said blankly.

“Not at the moment,” Master confirmed.

“Even though their leaders can see and sense everything that happens anywhere on the continent at any time?”

Finally, Master turned around, but only to shoot Pride a patronizing smile. “Hey, how ‘bout that? You did your homework too!”

“We need to fight,” Wrath interrupted before Pride could put forth a much more pretentious version of the same argument. “We need to crush them.”

“We need to settle down before we forgot our place in this little study group here,” Master argued. A little sliver of ice had snuck into his words again. “I am going to say this exactly two more times: I have it covered.”

“So you say,” Pride said dismissively, shaking his head and turning away in disgust. “So all the ponies who summon us say. You may hide your plan from us, but you can’t hide it from them. They’ll know. They’ll rip open the fabric of space and time, burrow under it like the spineless parasites they are, and simply wait for you to walk into their trap. We’ve seen better mortals than you laid to waste by less than half their order, so what makes you so sure you know better than them? Better than us? How do you know they aren’t on their way here right now?”

• • •

Bolstered by her newfound courage, Leo grabbed the biggest bottle of mead she could find off the rack, and trotted back over to Virgo while visions of glowy-light-power explosions danced in her head. Maybe midnight flash capacity tests in the Oasis courtyard weren’t such a good idea, but what if she just came down here in the cellar? It might be dark enough for a warm-up, just to get her glowy bits sufficiently... glowy. Would calling them “glowy muscles” be too much of a stretch?

Heh. Muscles. Stretch.

Anyway, after she was done in here, there might be a spot down in the valley where the light wouldn’t reach the mountaintop. She’d have to ask Virgo about it. No, on second thought, she wouldn’t ask anybody. A Hunter would make her own decisions, tread her own path, ask for forgiveness later and permission never. Or something like that, at least.

“Ha gut ih!” she shouted ahead to Virgo. Once she laid the bottle down on top of a nearby box and brushed the dust off her tongue, her words were a little clearer. “I got it,” she repeated. “Should we head back up, or... uh, Virgo? You okay?”

Virgo didn’t answer, nor did she turn away from the blank wall she was staring at or so much as twitch an ear. Leo tiptoed around to her front and peered up at her face, and for a moment panic coursed through her. Virgo’s eyes were gone! Where the hay were Virgo’s eyes? Did they fall out? Were they rolling around underhoof now?

Leo was halfway up on top of the crate she’d put the mead on before she realized she was being stupid and, more importantly, not very brave. Swallowing back the dryness in her throat, she crept back around to Virgo’s front and took a much closer look at her face. Soon enough, she figured out what was really going on: Virgo’s eyes were certainly still in their respective sockets, but they had glazed over with a milky fog that covered every colored part of each one: the black pupils, the sky-blue irises, even the little pink veins snaking out around the sides. All that was left were two snowy white orbs that blended in almost perfectly with the fur lining her face.

Leo laid an experimental hoof on Virgo’s nose, then a moment later poked her gently in the shoulder. When neither action provoked any kind of reaction, she sat back on her haunches and bit her lip, her terror from before coalescing into a queasy feeling deep inside her belly. She’d heard of this happening before: whenever Virgo’s precognition gave her a really big vision, she’d go completely stiff like this, and her eyes would fade out exactly like they were doing now.

But usually, her visions were brief, maybe ten seconds long at the max. This one had been going on for over thirty seconds now and counting, and she didn’t look ready to snap out of it any time soon. Leo’s heart jumped, and a bit of her glow petered away. What the hay was going on? What the hay was Virgo seeing?

• • •

For a moment, Greed thought Master was holding out a hoof to signal for Pride to put a cork in it, but she soon realized he was trying to look at something strapped to his ankle. “Because right now, if my watch is still right after the polarity reversal from your Summoning spell, they’ve got much bigger things to worry about than me,” Master said. He lowered his hoof and his gaze, the latter of which then locked solidly onto Pride.

“By which I of course mean the brutal, bloodthirsty, and highly unsightly armies of the Underworld advancing through the Badlands as we speak, due to reach Oasis by noon tomorrow and New Platinum by about this time the following night. Their legion will tear a path of destruction across the landscape ten thousand bodies wide, and every single iota of that strength will be directed towards the death and dismemberment of the very ponies who locked them away in the first place. They won’t succeed, of course, but that’s hardly the point, is it? They’ll be out of our manes for a day or so, and a day or so is all I’ll need to be ready for them.”

Pride opened his mouth, but not even so much as a grunt slipped out. Master blinked twice, stroked a hoof over his beard, and slowly curled his lips up into a smile.

“Satisfied?”

• • •

It took Virgo another seventeen seconds for her eyelids to finally close. When they opened again, Leo thought she could see that her normal eyes had returned, but right now she couldn’t bear to look straight at them long enough to be sure.

“Was... was that a v-vision?” Leo asked timidly, standing up as straight as she could once her shaking hind hooves managed to find purchase on the floor. “What did you see?”

Even though she was no longer paralyzed, Virgo still didn’t move for almost another twelve seconds. Leo forced herself to look up at the same time Virgo swiveled her head around to look at her, and the fiery mix of determination and anger broiling behind them was enough to set Leo’s mane on end.

“What’s going to happen?” Leo whispered. Her light was fading, cracking apart under the force of her heart pounding against her chest. Virgo pursed her lips and turned the rest of the way towards the stairs.

“What did you see?” Leo asked again.

There was no answer.

“Virgo, what did you see?”

• • •

It wasn’t quite like Master had just stabbed Pride in the gut. Actually, it was much, much worse than that. He’d humiliated the elder Vice, run mental circles around him and made him look like a fool in front of his entire pack. Not that it really bothered Greed in the slightest: call it a character flaw if you will, but she’d never really bought into the whole concept of bowing to the whims and wisdom of any leader, let alone a purely de facto one like Pride. But Master here was starting to write himself into a different story. Pride was all bark and no bite, and the second he turned his back on the gate to his cage, this mortal would—unbelievable as it was—have his way with him.

She admired that. And more to the point, she wanted that kind of influence all to herself.

So while Master retreated to bed for the final time, the gears in Greed’s head were beginning to turn. Summonings were always romantic affairs: brief, passionate, and inevitably over far too soon thanks to the Zodiac. There was something different about this one, though, and that something might just be the kind of thing she could use. Not work with, necessarily; it’d probably grind her nerves down to nubs just pretending to feign interest in this guy. At the end of the day, though, mortals were all the same: soft, squishy bags of gristle and bone, driven by base desires and completely convinced of their own invincibility. And the bigger that bubble of self-confidence got, the more they’d implode once somepony came in and pricked it. Somepony like the Vices. Somepony like her.

Master had reached his door by now. He turned around once he had swung the door open, and this time there was no mistaking it: he was absolutely looking at her. Yes, she could use him, and he could probably use a mare like her. Between his magic and her way with words, emotions, desires, and every other little niggling thought that stumbled through mortal minds, this whole planet would be theirs for the taking. And it was going to be easy. It was going to be fun.

“Like I said,” Master told her just before the door shut behind him. “I’ve got it covered.” And for the first time in whatever could be called her life, Greed believed what her Summoner said.

Turns out, looking on the bright side wasn’t bad at all.

Author's Note

This chapter marks the last time I'm going to repurpose passages from the old ITAM, and with that repurposing came a bit of a quandary. The original design I had for Wrath followed pretty closely to that whole "black smoke monster of death and dismemberment" deal, which became a problem halfway through writing this when I realized that, in light of this season's premiere, he was basically Sombra. I spent a couple days trying to figure out a way to write around it, then decided it wasn't worth the effort and, more importantly, it'd be more fun to try to tie that kind of connection into the show canon. Plus it allows me to not be personally accountable for such an admittedly god-awful character design.

So tl;dr: yes, Wrath is Sombra. Hope it's not too much of a bother to anyone, and bear in mind that he isn't the only character in this fic who's less of an OC than you might think.