Arcane Domination sat quietly in his study. Although he was surrounded by tablets, he was not reading; instead, he was taking a rare reprieve from his administrative duties and simply sitting, thinking.

Aside from tablets, he was surrounded by shelves filled with various artifacts from his long and successful life. There were skulls from the rare and dangerous creatures that he had hunted, as well as detailed statues and artifacts that his nation had acquired through conquest or through archeology. There were tiny models, some partly functional, of both the machines that he had been involved in designing as well as far more numerous abstract representations of groundbreaking spell that he had conceived.

He looked to these things without really seeing them. Now was not the time to consider his past glories, however, but a time to plan for the future. Arcane Domination was known for his skill with magic, but all trihorns were excellent with its use. Magic alone did not lift him to the status of Overlord of the Trihorn Empire; it had been his skill at organization, and his ability to create plans that guaranteed that he would get what he wanted.

In all his plans, though, he had never once suspected that Lord Goldmist would so overtly betray the alliance. Arcane Domination had intended for their mutual actions to be subtle and imperceptible. He himself had selected a number of incompetent and inexperienced generals for the unified front of the war, replacing them every time one of them was executed for inadequacy- -all while choosing his best commanders for direct defense of the Trihorn Empire specifically. He had wanted Goldmist to do something similar, but the fool had instead simply withdrawn his support for the war.

Arcane Domination smiled. That was exactly the sort of thing he should have expected from one blessed by the Madgod, of course. Goldmist was inherently unpredictable, as his rather impressive death had shown. Arcane Domination had been forced to induce the fall of the Aurasi earlier than he had originally anticipated, but he had always been intending on eliminating them anyway. There could only be one surviving race when the Choggoth War ended, and it would be the trihorns. Arcane Domination’s only regret was that he had not managed to cause more damage to central Draconian territory.

His reptilian eyes shifted toward the edge of his room, following the trail of the delicate chains that only he could see. His slaves recoiled into the shadows, as if his sight caused them pain. Arcane Domination hissed and clenched his hooves. It was simply not fair- -if he had been born in a different era, one without this war, he would have been hailed as a visionary, a genius, and a hero. It had been him who had lead the creation of the monohorns, a race that would revolutionize trihorn productivity and quality of life. Instead, he lived under the oppressive moralistic restrictions of the dominate Draconians, who saw him as a kind of monster, in conditions of a war that overshadowed his creations.

Worse still, the monohorns were beginning to progress in a direction he had not anticipated on. Each day, Arcane Domination’s regret grew for having ever sold one of his slaves to Crimsonflame. That slave- -which Crimsonflame had gone so far as to name- -had developed far further than monohorns were meant to. The reason monohorns only had one horn was to make them weaker at magic, and yet that particular monohorn- -Single Horn- -had achieved spellcasting ability on par with even some trihorns. There were even rumors that hit had learned to speak.

Those were more than rumors, of course. Despite attempts to cull deviant aspects of the monohorn population, some would occasionally gain that ability. Some showed signs of intelligence, and some even dared to attempt to escape. The situation was compounded by independent breeding operations- -some trihorns had used selective breeding with native ponies to create monohorns in color phases. Aside from being aesthetically garish, those doing such operations were not maintaining the traits for servitude properly; the monohorns they produced were inherently unstable.

Arcane Domination sipped from a goblet of blood. Blood from a gray monohorn mare, the most flavorful and savory of all the monohorn bloods he had yet had, and he had tasted many. He drained the container, and held it out silently. One of the slaves, stood and took a bottle in her magic- -a bottle of her own blood. She slowly brought it over and refilled the chalice.

The one called Single Horn herself was a problem as well. She had become a beacon of hope to her people, a grand hero. Assassinating her would be the best course of action, except that it was nearly impossible. She was almost always at Crimsonflame’s side, and usually on the front lines or in the center of Draconian territory. He would have better luck assassinating Crimsonflame herself, something he had considered numerous times but always deemed too dangerous or too costly.

He had to consider the fact that Single Horn might not be the only problem. The entire race of monohorns may have already become irreparably contaminated. There was a possibility that they would need to be purged entirely. An unfortunate loss, but not a great one; he could always rebuild them, and, in a world without dragons, perhaps they would function properly.

Once again, Arcane Domination took a sip of the blood. He then set it down on a table beside him, and stood up. While he had waited, he had started to feel it again, the ever-present sensation of being watched. It had dogged him for months, and although at first he had suspected that it was the strain of the war effort, he now believed that something truly was following him.

His three horns ignited with magic, filling the room with powerful light that parsed itself into geometric bands. His slaves were immediately bound to the floor, trapped by the spell, but they were not the only ones. The pattern of the spell shifted, and fell on a high corner of one of the stone-carved shelves. It formed a circle, and then a set of bindings.

“There you are,” said Arcane Domination, collapsing the remainder of the spell and increasing the power to that spot in particular. His quarry struggled, releasing a small cloud of weak magical sparks, but Arcane Domination overpower it easily.

He generated a disk of magical energy below himself and lifted himself upward to see what he had caught, the thing that had somehow found its way past his greatest mages and into his personal sanctum- -or been brought there.

The creature that struggled against his bindings was tiny, barely half the size of Arcane Domination’s hoof, and round. To his great interest, he saw the glint of bone and a horn and realized that the main part of its body was a rather small monohorn skull, which seemed to have generated a set of insect-like legs to suspend it. The skull had neither a flesh or jaw, but did seem to have something in one of its eye sockets: a mass of blue material, the same color as its legs, with a tiny symbol consisting of two triangles on it.

“You are a Choggoth,” said Arcane Domination, expanding the circle of protection into a sphere and levitating the grotesque creature. “I suppose you suspected that I did not notice you. I am sure you were intending to kill me.”

“No,” it gurgled, and Arcane Domination physically jumped back slightly. He had been entirely unaware that Choggoths had any vestige of intelligence, let alone the ability to speak. As far as he was aware, they were simply destructive fronts of shifting protoplasm whose only purpose was to consume. “For now,” said the head in nearly unintelligible sounds, “I only watch, and I wait.”

Blue sparks burst from it once again, but this time they actually managed to widen the opening in Arcane Domination’s spell. Before he could tighten it, the horn of the skull glowed with white light. There was an imposing snap, and the fragment of Choggoth was gone. It had either destroyed itself or teleported.

Arcane Domination released his spells and dropped to the floor. His preconceived notions about Choggoths had turned out to be incorrect. They seemed to be more intelligent than he had suspected; in addition, they seemed to be able to use a form of primitive magic that could enable small spies to enter even the most secure of locations. His day simply refused to improve.

He looked to the corner of the room where his slaves were quaking in fear. Not fear of the Choggoth, of course- -they had been too far away to see it clearly, and it was almost impossible that they had the capacity to understand what it had been. Their fear, Arcane Domination knew, was of him, and that made him glad. That, and the fact that he now had at least one piece of information that Crimsonflame did not.