"Lieutenant? Lieutenant?"

The voice slowly pulled Silent back to the waking world. With a groan, he tried to pick himself up off the floor unsuccessfully, feeling as though a great weight had been pulled off of him. The blurry image of Phillip standing above him in the middle of the now-dark room came into view.

"Give yourself time to recover," Phil said, shaking his head and rubbing his temples with his hooves. "Sleeping spells are no fun, mate."

Shaking his head to clear the cobwebs from his brain, Silent slowly stood back up. "We should get out of here," Phil said, heading to the door. Silent started to follow when his companion suddenly froze, holding up a hoof. It took a second, but then he heard it: two sets of hooves, clomping heavily up the stairs, the sound of their armored hoofsteps echoing off the hallway walls.

"Guards." The two immediately hurried to the window and pushed it open. As they started to climb through, there was a knocking at the door. "This is the Royal Guard. Is there somepony in there?" a gruff voice on the other side of the door shouted through.

Quiet as mice, the two climbed out the window. Silent took Phillip underneath his forelegs and lowered him to the ground (ignoring his hissed protests that he could have gotten down on his own). As soon as they touched down, the two began to run, disappearing into the darkness of the night.

As he flew low over the ground, weaving through the empty streets and dodging the light from street lamps with Phillip close behind, Silent replayed the meeting with the criminal mastermind and the unlocked memory over and over in his mind. It had been him the whole time. He was the attacker. He'd attacked Princess Luna. He'd tried to kill her.

"You have the mind of a murderer. A cold-blooded killer," Zugzwang's voice whispered in his ear. "How can you be certain that you didn't show everypony your true face that night?" The taunt echoed in his brain, blocking out almost everything else, even the wind rushing through his wings. He hardly even noticed when they stopped beneath a street lamp the middle of the empty Canterlot Central Park, where the wind whispered as it blew through the skeletal, shadowy trees. He slowly sat down on the park bench, lowering his face into his hooves as if to hide from the awful truth of what'd he done...what he was.

"You can't blame yourself."

Slowly, Silent Knight looked up at the sound of Phillip's voice. "I've been under Nevermore's toxins myself," Phil said, sitting on the sidewalk in front of his partner. "You can't tell what's real and what's not. You weren't in control of yourself." Seeing that his words had had no reassuring effect on Silent, Phillip sighed and continued, speaking to Silent's hooves.

"Look...I've known a lot of cold-blooded killers. I know what they're like...and I know you're not like that. Those drugs took you over, but they didn't change who you are, Silent." He looked up enough to peer at Silent's face, shifting his weight slightly from hoof to hoof as he did so. "No matter what you may or may not have done in your past, you would never have done something like that on your own. You'd never hurt anypony who didn't need to be hurt. You're a Royal Guard; you're better than that."

The words of reassurance and faith, the reminder of who he was and what his mission was, pushed the doubt out of Silent's head and he raised himself up. There was a job to do. "What now?" he asked, rising off the bench.

Phillip straightened up, the tender moment passing. "This," he said, reaching into his vest and pulling out a small envelope that smelled faintly of Saddle Arabian tobacco. "Our mutual friend left us this." He plucked a pocketknife from his best and flicked open a small blade, cutting the envelope open.

"Why would he leave us a clue?" Silent asked in bewilderment.

"Zugzwang's a malignant narcissist," Phil replied, looking over the letter within. "Dangling his plans in front of our faces, baiting us with clues for us to try to unravel...this is his way of trying to prove how smart he is." He read the contents of the letter out loud:

"Hidden right before your eyes on square B1, characters with an E on both ends."

"A riddle?" Silent asked.

"He loves those," Phil grunted, pacing in a circle as he thought out loud. "Let's break it down, bit by bit, and solve one piece at a time. On square B1..."

"In chess," Silent said. "B1 is the starting place for a knight." He looked at his white coat. "A white knight."

"Whatever we're looking for, it's in your old office," Phillip concluded. "Which is currently inhabited by..."

"Tandem Check," Silent cut in, remembering Zugzwang's earlier words: "Why does any player make a move? To gain an advantage." Both stallions saw the same realization in each other's eyes.

"Tandem Check is a spy. This frame job was to get him to replace me," Silent declared.

"Exactly," Phil nodded, his theory having been proven right. "That's also why they didn't just kill you; the investigation might have uncovered him." He returned to the sheet, pondering the rest of the riddle. "...characters with an E on both ends...Does he mean characters in a book, or characters as in letters?"

"The letters make the most sense," Silent said, scratching at the partial beard that he'd been growing against his will the past few days. "That would mean a word...with an E on both end..."

"Letters within..."

"Envelope!" they both exclaimed as one.

"We're looking for an envelope hidden in your old office in the Royal Palace," Phillip said.

"Except that I can't get in there, and I doubt that you can get that far," Silent commented.

"We—"

"Well, looky what we got here," a voice snarled from the darkness. Six ponies emerged from the shadows, surrounding the two stallions. "Two little ponies who don't know enough to stay at home at night," the speaker continued in a deep voice. He was a muscular earth pony with several puncture marks on his rusty red forelegs, wide green eyes and a crooked nose that had obviously been broken several times and not healed properly once. Every one of the ponies had a tattoo somewhere on their bodies: two gold bits and the number 13, identifying them as members of the Lucky Bit Gang, a recent upstart in the Canterlot underworld.

Silent and Phillip stood back to back calmly evaluating the threat facing them. "We don't have a problem with you," Silent said calmly.

The gang leader sneered and flicked his wrist. The switchblade knife appeared in his hoof like magic, declaring its intentions with a single click.

Silent and Phil glanced at each other and nodded subtly. "We now have a problem with you," Phillip spoke in a voice like approaching thunder. Almost before he had finished speaking, he leapt forward, knocking the thug leader's knife hoof down with his right leg as he snapped his baton out with his left, striking an unsuspecting thug in the temple with the telescoping end. Simultaneously, Silent bucked the boss in the gut, bringing him to the ground, wheezing.

The Lucky Bits had picked the wrong stallions to try to victimize. Phillip and Silent moved from one opponent to the next, easily deflecting their clumsy attacks and striking back with powerful counterblows before moving on to the next pony. The two seemed to almost speak silently to one another in a way that only trained and experienced Guards are capable of, coordinating dual attacks in a highly effective divide-and-conquer strategy that completely mitigated the numbers advantage against them.

Fending off one attacker armed with a club, Phillip turned to see Silent grappling with a dusty brown unicorn. He whipped his baton into the back of the unicorn's knee, causing it to buckle and giving Silent the opportunity he needed to finish him with a knee strike to the jaw. Ducking beneath a club swing at his head, Silent struck backwards with the back of his head to break his attacker's nose before seizing him underneath the jaw and bending forward quickly, flinging the pony up over his head and causing him to crash into another thug who was rushing Phillip from behind.

"Take this, you mugs!" a beefy unicorn snarled, charging up a destructive spell and firing. Silent and Phillip leapt clear of the spell's path and rolled back to their hooves, ignoring the explosion of energy where they had been standing a moment earlier. Having drawn his boomerang from a back pocket in his vest as he rolled, Phillip snapped it out at their attacker. The projectile spun through the air and struck the unicorn in the forehead, stunning him long enough for Silent to shoulder-ram him to the ground and knock him out with a solid hook to the jaw. The final goon gathered his courage and charged with a bellow like an angry minotaur. Silent dodged to the side and hit him with a clothesline so powerful that the pony was knocked off his legs and up into the air, giving Phillip the perfect chance to hit him in the chest with a downward elbow strike. The goon smashed hard into the ground, groaned once, and did not move again.

"You fight well," Phillip said, replacing both his weapons in his vest.

"So do you," Silent replied, barely breathing hard from the exertion.

"Right. As I was saying—"

A distinctive metal click pierced the suddenly still air. Turning, Phillip saw movement at the very edge of the lamplight. Barely visible in the hazy light, another pony stood, a large-caliber silver-plated pistol in his hoof, aimed at Silent's head. As if in slow motion, Phillip saw the hammer begin to move forward to strike the chamber.

Instinctively, he seized Silent Knight and shoved him aside out of the line of fire just as the air was pierced by a thunderous gunshot. A red-hot spear pierced Phillip's side, the impact striking him like a sledgehammer. He collapsed to the ground, unable to even cry out; his lungs were on fire and his heart felt like it was trying to burst from his ribcage. He tried to get up, but his limbs felt cold and heavy, as if they were encased in ice. Blood was spreading across his torso, trickling onto the grass.

Buck me. I'm dead. The realization gripped his mind like a python's grip.

Silent bent over him, his eyes wide with shock and concern. He tried to grab Phillip by the back of the neck and lift him up onto his back, but another gunshot forced him to duck. The gunpony had been joined by a couple of friends who were closing in, opening fire on the two ponies.

"Get out of here! Go!" Phillip shouted, his voice barely recognizable even to himself. Another bullet zipped past Silent's head, and he apparently realized that he was no good to Princess Luna dead, and trying to help Phillip would only slow him down. He took flight, chased into the sky by more gunfire. The echoing shots became more and more distant in Phillip's ears; blackness started to creep in around his vision, and he felt a great weight pushing him deep into the ground.

So this is death, Phillip Finder thought, and closed his eyes.

Author's Notes:

Good news: Silent Knight is innocent.

Bad news: Phillip is probably dead.

Read on...

(For further details on Alastair and his relationship to Silent Knight, please refer to Anzel's stories, Memoirs of a Royal Guard and Secrets of a Royal Guard)