“Would you care for some tea?” I ask my niece in what I consider a very civil tone, especially considering the circumstances. We’re in the kitchen, one of the few rooms not to have been destroyed beyond repair, and I’m pouring myself a cup. Some might think it an inappropriate time, but I find that a good brew always helps me to keep a level head. Plus, I just enjoy the flavor.

Cadence lets out a low moan from where she floats, held secure by my magic. You might think I’m showing an alarming lack of concern for her, but she’s an alicorn, like myself. She won’t perish of these injuries. In fact, if my calculations are correct within a few hours her body should have regenerated itself, albeit at a significant cost in magic.

In the meantime, we’re going to deal with this issue, here and now. I’ve had enough of games. I like to think of myself as a mother to my little ponies, and part of being a mother is a duty to scold wayward foals.

Cadence moans again, this time slightly different.

“No? Suit yourself.” I put away the cup I had pulled out for my niece.

Cadence grumbles something.

“Language, dear. Did all those protocol lessons go to waste?”

Cadence groans.

“Very well then.” I finish pouring my own cup of tea and take a sip. The cool liquid feels nice as it slides down my throat.

With a flash of golden light, my niece and I vanish from my kitchen and reappear in my bedroom. I lay her down gently on my oversized bed before tapping her throat with my horn. I release just a tad of healing magic into her system to repair the burns I inflicted when I sent my flames into her mouth and down her esophagus and trachea. Her larynx and respiratory system, already regenerating at an unnaturally fast pace, repair themselves almost to normal levels. She should be able to speak again.

What? You think burning my niece’s insides was cruel? Overkill? Not really. Alicorns, alone among pony subspecies, have the ability to fuel our vital processes solely with magic. It’s why we don’t technically need to eat, drink, breathe, or sleep. Though in any medical sense her body should be dead, it’s essentially forcing itself to not only live, but heal as well, by consuming vast quantities of her natural magic. Her body will recover soon, though her magic may be reduced for some time to come.

At any rate, she’s in no condition to flee or to fight me, which makes talking to this selfish foal much easier. Maybe I can even make her see some sense.

“Better?” I ask, once I think I’ve repaired her systems enough.

“Go to… Tartarus,” she manages.

I roll my eyes. So cliché. I wonder if she got that line from a movie. No matter.

“Now,” I sit back in chair beside my bed and take another sip of tea. “I find myself in a rather unfortunate predicament.”

“Why the… buck… you think… I care?”

“Because the predicament revolves around yourself and your husband.” I take another sip. “You see, believe it or not, my interest is primarily in avoiding unnecessary bloodshed.”

She coughs. “Liar.”

“You know what I’m talking about. Your husband is walking beacon of dark magic, and continues to be for every second he is alive.”

“Not… alive. You… killed him,” she wheezes.

I raise an eyebrow. “I realize that it is thought admirable to bluff to protect your loved one, Mi Amore Cadenza, but the unfortunate fact is that you’ve already admitted to me that he yet lives.”

“You… lie…”

“Oh? Does this sound familiar?” I cast a spell on myself to make my voice that of my niece. “Just like you tried to do to him, Auntie dearest.”

“… Damn.”

“I can remember things, niece. Just because I’m old doesn’t mean I can’t put two and two together anymore. That you called my attempt “trying” implies that it did not succeed. Shining Armor is still alive.”

“What… do you… want?”

“The same thing I’ve always wanted, my niece: I want to protect the ponies. Your husband is a danger to them, and remains so for every second that he remains alive. So I took measures to rectify the situation.” I sigh. “In retrospect, I admit that this wasn’t my best plan ever. I was moved too much by sentiment to make the liquidation of my former captain as quick and painless as possible to spend enough energy properly covering my tracks. A failure I shall I have to learn from.”

“You… won’t… touch him.” Her limbs quiver slightly, then collapse again.

“Mi Amore, you are no shape to fight me. Please refrain from futile gestures. They make for good stories but poor life policy.” I take a sip of tea.

“If you… kill him… will be… war,” she manages, still unable to crack open her eyes.

“Indeed? And did you consider what would happen if you had succeeded in your earlier attempt to kill me?”

Her silence is deafening.

I smile slightly and sip more tea. “Now, part of my problem is this: from where I’m standing, there is little option to avoid some kind of war. If I terminate Captain Armor, there will be war. However, I let him go, not only will the dark magic remain, but you are likely to seek revenge, almost certainly resulting in some fool war with me.” I take another drink. I’m going through this cup pretty quickly. “As I would prefer that Equestria and the Crystal Empire do not fight a prolonged war, it seems to me that the best way to minimize the bloodshed would be to execute you, execute your husband, and personally take this city with my sister. Yes, some will inevitably die, and many will hate me for the remainder of their mortal lives, but all but the most foolish will submit with their rulers eliminated and a pair of goddesses breathing down their necks.” I sigh wearily. “I don’t particularly enjoy the idea of that option, as it comes at the cost of the lives of, at minimum, several dozen ponies. Two of them being my family. And of course, my student will be permanently alienated from me. Twilight would never forgive me for liquidating her brother and her foalsitter. And then the very action of taking over an empire will force me to put off some of my diplomatic maneuvering for an entire generation or more. I’ll have the warrior-princess reputation again, not the peacemaker identity I need right now. So this would truly be a suboptimal solution.”

“You… scum…”

I shake my head. “No. Just a concerned ruler who doesn’t place her emotions over the well-being of her subjects. I have many wicked deeds on my conscience already. I feel that I can endure a few more, if need be.” I drain the last of my tea and set the cup aside. “However, this would come at a particularly deep price for me. Therefore, I am giving you the chance to try and talk me out of it.”

“Not your… subjects… My… jurisdiction...”

“I thought I’d told you before, Cadence. We are alicorns. Whatever the temporary laws of mortals may say, our jurisdiction is universal. Whether or not the Crystal Empire technically falls under your domain, I think of these ponies as every bit as much my own as those of Equestria, and I will not tolerate a continued threat to them.” I pause. “And I think you’ll find the practical realities to be very much weighted in my favor. I’m rather in a position to dictate conqueror’s terms.”

“Thought we… settled this… way back…”

“No, we did not “settle this”. You angrily declared that the combined power of your mutual love magic and the Crystal Heart would be more than adequate to see off anything your husband’s beacon might draw, declared that the matter did not fall under my authority in the first place, and then stormed out of our meeting in a huff.” I get to my hooves as a craving hits me. “Excuse me for a moment, niece. I’m going to go get some more tea and bit of cake. Would you care for anything?”

Cadence just hisses at me.

I sigh wearily. “Very well then. I shall give you a moment to think up a reason why I shouldn’t take the path I’ve already outlined. Yes, it would come at a heavy price for me personally, but I’m willing to endure to see the Empire continued prosperity. But I would still like a better solution. See if you can come up with one.”

I wrap the room in a spell to ward off teleportation, just in case, before walking down to my kitchen and retrieving another glass of chilled tea and some angel food cake from my refrigerator. I like my little indulgences when I’m feeling particularly worn or stretched. Some ponies call the habit unhealthy, but I don’t think I’d have gotten through certain points in my long lifetime without a bit of stress eating. Besides, it gives my niece time to come up with an argument to stay their execution, which I admit I want more than anything else right now.

When I return to my bedroom a few minutes later, I find my niece still lying helplessly on my bed. However, she’s managed to crack her eyes open, and I can see that a few patches of blackened skin have returned to their natural baby pink. I don’t think it will be long before the first hairs on my niece’s coat begin to come back.

“So,” I ask, hoping and praying for a different answer than what I’m expecting. “Have you come up with a reason I shouldn’t kill you both and take your kingdom myself?” Please, please, my little pony, surprise me.

“Shining’s beacon doesn’t… have to be… forever…” she manages in a wheezing tone.

I raise an eyebrow and take a nibble of cake. Dare I to hope that my niece is finally maturing? “You mean that you are ready to let him go? After all this time, you’re seeing sense.”

She shakes her head as vigorously as she can, which in her current state amounts to a barely-perceptible quiver. “ No… Can make it… go away… Just need… time...”

I sigh. I was hoping for more, or at least a better lie. “Cadence, you and I both know that dark magic is all that binds his soul to that abomination of a body you constructed for him. To dispel it is to kill him, and you know it. No other magic contains lore for violating a soul like that.” I close my eyes and take another long drink of tea, readying my mind. It seems that I shall have to execute my niece after all, the way things are going, and I’ll need as much mental fortitude as I can-

“I have… a plan… Can… show you...”

I raise a skeptical eyebrow. “Indeed?”

“Swear it… no tricks…”

I look into her eyes. I don’t have the naturally heightened sense of empathy that my niece is blessed with, but I do have a lot of practice reading a pony, especially one I’ve known for such a long time. She meets my gaze head on. We stare into each other’s eyes for some time before I finally break the contact.

“Show me.”

Celestia – I can’t bring myself to think of her as Auntie, not anymore – and I appear with a golden flash in a dark cavern, deep under the city. I’m still barely capable of moving my head, much less walking, so Celestia has me in her magical grip.

“Over… there…” I manage to wheeze out. Gods, my voice sounds horrible. “Illusion… on the wall…”

Celestia’s horn shoots out a wide cone of golden light, looking more like a lighthouse than anything else. It sweeps over the cavern wall in a circle. A wide piece of “rock” shimmers and dissolves away into nothingness, revealing a hole and a tunnel beyond.

“Watch the floor… jinxes and hexes…” I breath heavily at even this slightest exertion, my body frantically eating up all my energy to repair itself to functionality. I’ll be lucky if I can cast more than the simplest of spells for weeks. I may even have to tap into the Crystal Heart for a power boost.

Celestia unceremoniously blasts the floor in the tunnel entrance and sweeps inwards, vaporizing the runic glyphs I’d carved in for protection’s sake. As the dust settles, hard stepping sounds begin to come from within the tunnel, heading this way. Celestia looks at me and raises an eyebrew.

“Crystal golems… guardians…” Hot damn I’m already sick of speaking like this

When the first of the pony-shaped crystal statues I animated rounds a bend and comes into view, Celestia takes a single shot at it with a lance of gold magic. It explodes into tiny fragments without even getting to do a damn thing. The next one, too mindless to know fear and set on its duty, rounds the corner to face the intruder without even the slightest hesitate. It too is unceremoniously blasted to tiny shards of crystal by the white alicorn.

She waits and listens for a moment before speaking again. “Just two?”

“Yes…” I whisper, feeling embarrassed by the comparative paucity of my defenses when measured against what she had in her home.

“Anything else I should know about?”

“Ceiling… just before main… cavern… powerful curse…” I gasp out.

“And that’s all?”

“Correct…”

“Very well then.”

Celestia walks through the tunnel in silence, carrying my limp form behind her. She blasts the ceiling to rubble when we near the tunnel’s end, and simply makes the resultant rubble vanish in a blink. With all its defenses swept aside like insects, Celestia steps out into my laboratory. It’s the same as ever, with bookshelves and potion wracks and chemistry sets and scientific equipment scattered throughout the mid-sized cavern.

“So…” she says, taking the place in with a sweep of her head. “You have a secret laboratory, rather like some mad scientist in a cliché horror movie. What precisely are you attempting to do in this place?”

“Make… an alicorn…” I wheeze out.

Celestia an eyebrow.

“A body… for Shiny…” I explain. “Dark magic… needed to hold a soul… to a golem… but not… to a soulless body… if they accept it…”

“You are attempting to create a soulless alicorn form for your husband to inhabit. And you didn’t tell me about this… why?”

“Was afraid… you might stop it…”

“And you choose to reveal it now, because…”

“You’ll kill… Shiny… if I don’t… please…”

“I see,” she nods imperiously, before walking amongst the bookshelves and potion racks. She pauses by the twin unicorn corpses, kept safely preserved by my spells. “Where did you get these, niece?”

“Stole them… from a university… Bodies… donated to science…”

Celestia checks the cadavers over for a tense minute, and for a few seconds I fear she doesn’t believe me, believes that I murdered them or something. But then she nods in apparent acceptance and moves on. She pauses by my cell cultures, reading the labels over carefully. She picks a few binders, apparently at random, from the shelf and checks them over.

“You have Sombra’s old notes down here,” she observes as she flicks through the sheets of paper.

“He knew… a lot… whatever else he was…”

“Hmmm, I see.” She returns my binders to their shelf and continues her impromptu tour of my facility. When she finally comes into view of the alicorn skeleton, I brace for the worst, wishing for all the world I could teleport so that I could grab Shiny and run to the edge of the earth. Her eyes go wide, then narrow. I can see a tear escaping them.

“Niece, could you kindly explain why you have my cousin’s bones in display cabinet?”

“Your… cousin?” I manage, surprised. I didn’t know she was related. Granted, the alicorn community was never very large even at its height, but…

“The daughter of my mother’s sister. Her name was Elysium. She was, as far as I know, the last alicorn filly ever to be born,” Celestia says in a mournful tone. “I helped to raise her, when all our parents went to battle Discord and left us with caretakers. They never came back.” Another tear trickles down her face. “When she was murdered… it hurt. But I never found out what had become of her body.”

“Found it… down here…”

“Hmmm?” Celestia looks at me quizzically. “You aren’t the first to use this place, are you?”

“No…” I reply weakly, dreading what is surely coming next.

“This was King Sombra’s laboratory first, wasn’t it?”

“Yes…”

“This is where you found the lore Twilight used to preserve Shining Armor, isn’t it?”

“Yes…” I’m too exhausted to even think up a lie.

“I see,” she says again. She seems to love that phrase. She looks at the other alicorn’s bones again. “Why do you keep them here?”

“Think… they might be useful… in creating… a body…”

“Hmmm… very well.”

“What?” She’s just dismissing the fact that I’ve desecrated her own family’s bones? I realized that she was cold blooded when she tried to kill Shining behind my back, but damn.

“The dead are dead, Mi Amore Cadenza,” she says with a harsh look in her eyes. “And they have no further need of their bodies. If they can be used to better serve the living, so be it.”

Wow, that’s pretty cold.

Wait. “Better serve the living”? Does that mean…

“I have reached a decision, niece,” Celestia’s voice cuts into my thoughts.

“Go on…” I prod. “Listening….”

“I have decided to pardon you for your murder and attempted murder. Further, I will give you more time to pursue this research. I feel it may be worthwhile if it should bear fruit. However,” her voices becomes harder than steel. “There are conditions to my mercy.”

“Name them…” I’ll say anything, do anything if it stops this traitorous witch from killing Shiny.

“First: I will expect an accurate summary of your results thus far, along with regular updates on the status of your research.”

“Done…” I say, without hesitation.

“Secondly: You will tell nopony of what passed between us this night. Ever, under any circumstances. The public must never know that such close allies as Equestria and the Crystal Empire nearly came to war and regicide.”

Only because you started it, witch.

On the outside, I nod. “What about… breaking up the ball… Lockdown?” I pause for breath. “What do we… tell them?”

“Simplicity itself. We already have a dead noblepony to pin the whole thing on. We announce that Lady Rose Quartz committed treason against the Crystal Empire and attempted regicide out of spite and ambition. You merely executed the due penalty for such crimes, with my help. Naturally, she was working alone.”

“You think… they’ll buy that?”

Celestia smiles knowingly. “My dear niece. Have you not noticed that most everypony is inclined to believe anything an alicorn princess tells them? With two telling the same story? Only the usual conspiracy fools will even doubt it for a second.” Her smile drops. “To the public, Lady Quartz was a traitor, and she tried to kill her prince. That is all they need to know.”

That’s ruthless, Celestia. She was your mare the whole time, and you’re going to besmirch her name after she died in your service? You are frigid as the northern ice.

A thought comes to mind. “What of… her children?” Even after all that she did to me, I don’t want to harm two innocents for the crime of being born to the wrong mother.

“I will see to their safe and anonymous exit from the Empire. I have a place for them in Canterlot. It will not replace their mother, but her death will secure her family’s future, just as she would have wanted.”

“I…agree…” I manage. My breathing is hard again from all this talking.

“Excellent,” Celestia smiles again. “Thirdly,” her face goes deadly serious and she leans in close to mine. “If you should succeed in your plan, you must agree to bear foals again. Alicorn foals. Many of them.”

“Alright…”

“And you must agree to send them all to me for training. Every. Single. One.” Our faces are practically touching, and her eyes flicker back and forth between the usual purple and solid white. “Agreed?”

I hesitate. She’s essentially asking me to sell my future children to her like some… commodity.

“… Niece?” her tone is fierce, something like sound of a damn holding back a massive flood. “What say you?”

If it will save Shiny…

I manage a weak wheeze that should have been a sigh. “…Agreed.”

I’ve just promised my children to the very mare who tried to murder their would-be father. I feel sick inside.

“Finally, niece, remember that is a time-limited pardon. Your introduction of the… potential benefits of your actions changes my assessment of the situation, but the other facts remain unchanged. Shining Armor’s existence is a continuing danger to the citizenry of the Crystal Empire, and I will not permit it to remain so forever. You have convinced me to forestall his termination… but no more. I will watching you very carefully, Mi Amore Cadenza. I will be reading your reports. I expect to see progress. If I judge you cannot succeed… or you try to break our agreement…” She trails off. She doesn’t need to say any more. “Now,” she gets back in my face. “Do we have a deal?”

“We… do…”

She touches her horn to mine, and it alights with magic. “Swear it.”

“I… swear…

“Do you, Princess Mi Amore Cadenza of the Crystal Empire, swear in the presence of all the gods, love, friendship, and magic itself to faithfully follow the conditions I have given you for your reprieve? Do you swear to faithfully send me all accurate information from your endeavors, to keep secret our conflict from all for all eternity, and to bear alicorn children that I may train? Do you so swear?”

“I… so swear.” I can’t believe what I’m doing.

Celestia’s horn glows a deep, dark green as runes trail from it and wrap themselves about my own horn. I can feel the geas permeating me, attaching itself parasitically to my magic and binding me to obey my oath. It feels like slimy tentacles are writhing around inside my brain, but there’s nothing I could do to stop them now even if I tried.

The spell takes several seconds to cast. Celestia’s horn emits tendril after tendril of green runes that bind themselves about my body and mind. But eventually, the small ritual is over, and the geas is firmly placed around me. I don’t know what the specific penalty is for breaking it, but judging from the way it felt in my brain, I’ll lose a good portion of my mind, if not all of it.

“It is done,” Celestia says.

Author's Notes:

So I decided I didn't feel like making you wait until Monday. Enjoy.