The grey sky rumbled threateningly, as it had been doing all afternoon. The white unicorn pausing to peek up from underneath her hoodie, through her black dyed forelock, at the dark clouds that could be glimpsed far above the narrow street she walked. A single fat raindrop falling with a splat on the amethyst lens of her goggles. She barely reacted, her face remaining frozen in a stony expression of disinterest, and simply shook the errant drop to fall at her hooves. The cobbles before her wet and shiny as they had been for most of the day.

Wild weather was a pain in the plot, it could spend an entire day making life wet and miserable without ever raining hard enough to accomplish anything more useful than making you wet and miserable. When pegasi had been in control of the weather, rain came in cleanly defined showers, often torrential, but easy enough to plan for. Still, for what she was planning to do, she hoped the weather would continue to be properly atmospheric.

Vinyl Scratch took a moment to feel under her hoodie, making sure her I-Pone was still secure and attached to the small speaker unit she had stuffed into a zippered pocket. Her trademark Hoofbeatz headphones were tucked around her throat where they belonged, just for looks at the moment, since her music player would be doing something else for her in a few minutes. Her hoof traveled over the other… prop... strapped to her upper right foreleg. For a second, her impassive mask cracked, a frown pulling at her lips as a weary heartache threatened to drag her to the ground.

She remembered that day at a record store with Tavi. They had just finished lunch, and an animated debate where she had maintained that the common pony wasn’t as dead to music as Octavia thought them in these darker times. Sure there had been fewer and fewer moments where the odd music of the soul was shared as had occurred almost daily in pre-revolution Equestria. The impromptu dance numbers and shared feeling amongst members of a cohesive herd had been at times annoying, and at others seriously embarrassing. But that didn’t mean that ponies were desensitized or deaf to music nowadays.

With a trademark brash smirk, Vinyl had nudged Tavi with a hoof and gave her a ‘watch this’ quirk of her ears. Cranking her headphones to eleven, reveling in a great dance mix she had begun to wander through the shelves, the muffled ‘oontz oontz oontz’ of her jam following her as closely as her own heartbeat. Her head bobbing to the beat as she poked her snoot into a bin next to a browsing unicorn stallion.

In under ten seconds she watched with satisfaction as the beat latched onto him. A rear hoof tapping almost without conscious thought as she moved on. By the time she had a trio of mares nodding along to the driving brassy thump of her music she turned a triumphant grin on her marefriend. The small shop soon moving hooves, and hips, and bobbing heads in time to her music, even if they didn’t realize it was happening.

And Tavi had smiled. A smile like Vinyl so rarely saw from her anymore. A smile that had reached her eyes and sent a bloom of warmth through Vinyl’s chest.

The sky rumbled again and she shrunk against one building which had a bit of overhang as more heavy raindrops spattered to the cobbles. That memory, that… smile. She felt her jaw clench and she fought with herself to get it to relax. Trying to get her mind back on track, she checked the clock on the tower down the street… two minutes. She didn’t have time to fall apart now. She took a deep breath and blew it out sharply, as she often did before a difficult performance.

And this would likely be a doozy of a performance.

The guard patrol had passed without incident, and the belltower began tolling the half hour. The white unicorn moseyed slowly down the dripping street in the now gentle rain that was falling. She kept the guards in sight until they rounded the corner just as the last chime struck. A quick glance showed nopony was in the street, and she made her move.

Horn lighting as she stepped up to a nondescript door on an unimportant street, the lock giving her no trouble as she slipped inside. She had twenty minutes before the patrol passed this spot again. The foyer she stood in was plain and a little shabby. Old creaky wood floors, faded wallpaper, old gas jet lighting. Well lived in, and if not super well taken care of, at least not badly mistreated.

She started with carefully layered buffer spells, the glow from her horn crawling up the walls and across the ceiling and floor. Any time she had a gig in a stuffy part of town, she had always used sound dampening magic to not get the guard called on her. Ironic that she was doing the same thing for the same reason all over again.

The glow faded along with the sound of the rain. She didn’t have much time until her audience for tonight's performance arrived. Without exterior noise to dull it, the sound of her hoofsteps down the hallway, and the occasional squeak of a floor board seemed creepily magnified. It caused her lips to twitch, the faintest beginnings of a smile before the frost thickened and it was lost again.

An unused dining room, the table stacked with unpacked boxes, was the only door to the left of the hallway. To the right, a small kitchen with a tiny table crammed into the back of it and the door to a small office/bedroom. It was so very… familiar. She’d had a little one pony flophouse like this herself before… before she’d moved in with Tavi.

The door at the end of the little hallway was a tiny, cramped broom cupboard, with a single broom and one mop leaned to one side. She examined the little space carefully before she heard the over loud scrape of a key in the lock. Squeezing into it, she pulled the cupboard door shut with a click just as the front door pushed open. All but holding her breath she held motionless as she peered through one of the thin louvers on the door. A softly mumbling unicorn clopped in from the street, pushing the door shut behind him with a rear hoof. Setting down a dripping briefcase which had apparently been serving as an umbrella. The rain seemed to have picked up.

He wasn’t much to look at, thin and lanky. He looked like a stiff breeze would blow him over, and it probably had, numerous times. A dull grey coat and a slightly less dull grey mane and tail. Blue-green eyes behind rain spotted and fogged spectacles. Nondescript, shabby clothing in the working class styles of five or six years ago. The sort of stallion that just blended into the background for everypony around him.

Vinyl felt the flutter of nerves deep in her belly as he shook himself off. Seeming not to notice the unnatural silence of his apartment, he mumbled his way slowly down the hall and into the kitchen. Vinyl’s hoof hovered near her music player, but she bit her lip. She didn’t want to overplay her hoof.

She only had one chance at this after all.

Slowly she lowered her hoof, perking her ears and listening hard to the noises from the other room. The clink and tussle of glass and paper presaged him returning with a bottle of some low end beer and a ready-mac noodle bowl which he took with him into his bedroom, his head popping back through the door to snatch his briefcase in his magic and drag it through after him.

She closed her eyes and took a long, slow breath. The waiting was the hardest, waiting for him to settle, to go about the comfortable banality of his usual evening rituals. ‘Twitchy’, as he was known around the neighborhood, was technically a member of the Guard. Though not of the armored and steely eyed variety. He was a paper pusher, a desk jockey who dealt with bookings and filings and the morass of legal paperwork that came with each and every pony hauled in on charges.

It had taken her a week of very cautious probing to find out who had been ponying the desk the night Tavi had been brought in. She knew for a fact that no paperwork had been filed, no charges, no court date, no record of lockup or certificate of release. Octavia had passed through the precinct doors between two burly guardsponies and had fucking disappeared into thin air. She had been ‘Vanished’ as the local lingo termed it.

One didn’t asked where a Vanished pony went.

One didn’t raise a legal objection on a Vanished ponies’ behalf.

One didn’t make a stink unless one wished to be Vanished as well.

It was a dead end of inquiry, no matter who the pony had been.

Vinyl didn’t care one bucking bit. Nopony took what was hers.

And thus she was here, trying to calm her breathing as she carefully peered through the dimming light at the front door, ensuring it was locked, ensuring the silencing spells were stable. Had it been any pony but Twitchy, she wouldn’t have tried this. Her hoof silently found the play button on her I-Pone and gently depressed it. The speaker in her pocket began to vibrate in short, steady pulses. She could feel it hum but couldn’t hear it at all.

That was exactly as it should be. She had spent half the night breaking down and rejigging the speaker and its arcanotech components to emit infrasound. The lower end of the sonic spectra, below the range that ponies could actually hear.

Hearing, however, wasn’t the only means by which sound meant something to a pony. Infrasound, too low for the ears to pick up, still was felt, and felt by different degrees by different body tissues. The soft low volume sound coming from the speaker was too low to cause any serious effects, but it was there to just build a baseline. To insinuate itself into the environment as a subtle rhythmic little pulse, like a resting heartbeat.

C’mon Vinyl, 15 minutes to curtain.

The faint tapping and susurrus of chalk on stone roused Green Leaves from the dreamless depths of sleep. She lay, listening to the soft noise, her body as of yet not willing to move even to open her eyes. She lay on a soft surface, surrounded by warmth. Her cheek was pressed into a plush softness that smelled strongly of Cadance. She managed a sharp inhale at remembering that. The malaise in her head clearing enough for her to giving a languid stretch. Feathers tickling along her side as she moved, she was tucked under a wing.

The memory of her last waking moments bringing a rush of heat to her cheeks to equal the incredible warmth of the alicorn who had held her as she slept, when she had finally given in to exhaustion. And what a way to get exhausted it had been. Some tiny part of her mind was scandalized at her behavior, but by and large she felt too enervated at that moment to heed the prompting. She knew she should feel some sense of distress at such… uncharacteristic abandon. And yet…

Slowly she managed to unglue her eyelids and force them open a crack, drawing in a long slow sigh of breath as she looked up at the Alicorn who still held her. Cadance’s horn was lit and her attention was directed elsewhere, she seemed unaware of her waking. She studied the features of the demonic creature, the fangs, the predator’s eyes, and feeling perverse, tried to fear them. She tried to imagine those fangs tearing out her throat, those piercing orange eyes reveling in her terror… and she couldn't. She found nothing worthy of fear in her fiendish aspects, only a chaotic beauty to her mein.

She had feared last… night? She has no sense of time in this dark cellar-like chamber. She had found terror for a few brief moments when she had felt the Archdemon’s naked hunger. But it wasn’t flesh that Cadance had craved, and the outside world and its cruelties had faded into an unimportant blur for the hours in which she had first tentatively and then fervently explored a new realm of sensuality and intimacy with her newfound demonic lover. She’d felt so beautiful, so desired. And with that sense of a beauty coveted had come a subtle sensual feeling of power. Perhaps it was all head games the demon was playing with her, but if so… she’d thank her for them anyway. It was rare in this world for an Earth Pony to feel any of those things anymore.

The persistent sound of chalk lightly scraping on stone finally drew her attention away from her… bedmate, and she lifted her head from where it rested against Cadance’s chest to look around, and froze in shocked wonder! She was still in that same hateful stone chamber as before, there was a cocooned lump of black against one wall that could only be her foalnapper, but what riveted her attention was the telekinetic dance going on around all around her.

Chalk lines spiraled out from around the edge of the shadowy couch upon which they lay snuggled together. Intricate markings and runes flowed across the smooth stone floor in whirls and whorls continuing right up the walls to either side, a half dozen worn down sticks of chalk held in the deep green of fel magic continued their stately dance, leaving behind them designs of precise arcane significance. The shapes and forms meant nothing to Green Leaves, yet the beauty of the design and the obvious concentration of the Alicorn left no doubt of the untapped potential of the work.

“Ooooooh.” The soft exclamation had left her lips before she even realized she was going to make it. The mare lifting a hoof to cover her mouth as her gaze flicked repentantly back to Cadance, one shouldn’t spoil such concentration after all.

But the alicorn just smiled as she lifted all the chalk bits from the stone and set them gently down, her focus shifting to the pretty young thing nestled close beneath her wing. A flash of a gleefully wicked smile was all the warning Green Leaves had before sinfully soft lips claimed hers once more. “Mmmph!” She gasped into Cadance’s mouth, a light shudder passing through her frame as the Archdemon’s intoxicating hunger for her pulled at her thoughts like the current of a river, a firm steady pressure seeking to carry her away. She was a single pounding heartbeat away from surrendering to it once more when the demonic alicorn tenderly broke off the kiss, leaving her gasping hotly and flustered.

And in that moment, more than anything, she was sorry Cadance had stopped.

“Mmmmh, good morning my dearling.” The words murred bare inches from her ear sent another delightful shiver down her spine, her blush redoubling as she pressed her face into the demons silken chest once more, giving an inarticulate murmur in reply. She felt the wing which covered her wrap a little more tightly. She felt as much as heard Cadance’s soft chuckle and could do nothing but hug more tightly in return.

Slowly the demon coaxed her away from her plush ruff to look her in the eyes. “There we are.” She cooed softly, lifting a hoof to gently stroke the Earth Pony’s blushing cheek. “I’ve a lot to thank you for dearie. I’m very nearly strong enough to do what needs to be done.”

Green Leaves ears pricked at that and she managed to pull her thoughts together enough to figure out how to work her mouth again. “W-what needs to be done?” She managed, blushing at the shy stutter she couldn’t quite keep out of her voice.

“To bring the others back too.”

The others… Cadance was.. h-had been the Princess of Love in the old regime. She and Twilight Sparkle, the Princess of Friendship and Bearer of Magic, flanked by the living bearers of the rest of the Elements of Harmony had protested the coup, and had been… exiled. Banished… Oh sweet Celestia..

“They sent you to T-Tar…” She couldn’t make her numb lips finish shaping that horrible word.

“Yes.” Cadance spared her completing the statement. For statement it would have been, considering her befanged and demonic appearance now. For a second the alicorn's face became rigid, the surface bleakly frozen but her eyes alive with pain and hatred. Green Leaves felt the metallic tang of bile in her throat, yet she knew the violent emotion was not directed at her. “And it’s taken us three centuries to find a way back.”

“Th-three?! No! It’s only b-been ten years since you were…” Her shock made her stiffen, and drew the Archdemon back from her inner revelry. Her wing and foreleg tightened gently, and Green Leaves felt the anxious energy draining out of her body in that embrace.

“Ten for you, my little pony.” She murmured softly. “Time works differently in Infe… in Tartarus. Thirty years have passed for those down there for every one up here.”

Three hundred years… Green Leaves could comprehend the number, but couldn’t fit the idea of it in her head. To be cast into hell, and claw your way back out… even changed? Yet Cadance was not a demon, not the wanton creature of destruction she was always been told demons were. She was gentle… kind. There was nothing to fear from her. “A-are the others like you?” She asked in a small voice, unsure how the question might be taken.

Cadance gave a lopsided smile. “Yes, and no. None of us are unchanged. I’d like to think we’ve held on to something of what we were… but how much? None of us could say for certain.” She gave an elegant shrug as she cleared the last traces of hurt from her expression. “That’s rather less important than what we’ll do now.”

The mare gave a little shiver at the eagerness in those words. “And that would be?” She had an inkling before the question even left her lips.

“Why, revenge my dear.” Cadance responded with an almost teasing lilt to her voice. “There’s a score three centuries overdue that needs to be settled. And we’re planning to call it in.” The cheshire grin that settled on the Alicorn’s features was slightly madcap, it was true, but somehow Green Leaves couldn’t bring herself to recoil from it.

“On the unicorns? No, no… th-the Nobles?” Green Leaves heard the slight hiss as she bit off that final word, swallowing passed the lump in her throat for the newfound hatred she found in her heart. Her head slewing sideways to regard the black cocoon on the wall with narrowed eyes. The pile of horseapples hanging there silently was cultured and erudite and everything a noble unicorn was supposed to be, and a foalnapper, murderer and all around waste of oxygen. “You’re going to kill… th-them?” She hissed, eyes stinging. She gritted her teeth against the tears blurring her vision. She didn’t want to lose sight of the… whoreson that had taken her only family from her. She cried out when a gentle hoof touched her cheek and turned her face away, her desire to resist the movement insufficient to prevent Cadance from drawing her gaze again.

“If we have our way? Yes.” The coldness of the words, and the cruel anger that looked out at her from those orange slitted eyes nearly took her breath away. The mare let out a whispered sob as her resistance gave way. “If I can draw Twilight and the others through, we will cast down the noble houses and remake Equestria anew.” With difficulty the Alicorn mastered her rage, and as she did Green Leaves felt her own somewhat abating as well.

“What else do you need?” The voice sounded like hers, yet was several degrees more chill than anything she had ever uttered before in her life. She had a direction now, a goal. Not a sane goal, nor a nice one. She might be remembered in infamy for this, or be just as forgotten by time as any other Earth Pony was these days, but she was going to help bring a reckoning down on the head of the bastard pinned to the wall and all those like him.

Cadance’s expression grew stony, the last guttering flames of her anger snuffed in an instant, except for the intensity of her eyes as they bored into hers, as if studying the contents of her soul. The Archdemon's mouth was pinched in thought, fangs worried at her lower lip for a moment. Finally she drew breath to speak. “Every summoning requires… raw material. The circle, scribed of chalk or paint, or etched into stone which becomes the contract binding the summoned. The energy of the summoner, offered either through channeled magic, or through blood which empowers the gateway to draw a demon through. And that which is to be offered in exchange for that which is called, the ‘fare’ for passage.”

Green Leaves blinked, mulling over this explanation. “Offered. A sacrifice? Like I was for you?”

“In a way, dear, yes. Only we have spent decades preparing for this. It was vital that I make it through the summoning with my free will intact. Thus the… well, ‘payment’ for my passage needed to not be as he intended. Thus, he offered you as fare, but we paid it from our end, or more precisely, Twilight did. The energy she infused into the gate took decades to gather, all of it used up in an instant, just to get me through without… well, consuming the sacrifice and completing his contract.”

“So… if you’re trying to bring six more… ponies… through, what will you use to pay that fare then?” She caught the slightest flinch from the archdemon, feeling it only because she lay pressed so close. It awoke a terrible suspicion.

“Well, for starters, Mr. Summoner over there. But a single, unwilling offering would only bring one maybe two of my friends through, and likely in bad shape. Doing that, we would immediately have to flee before we could be tracked down and contained. Wherever we are, he wouldn’t have been hiding this room so deeply unless he was worried of discovery, so most likely it’s in a cellar in Canterlot somewhere. We couldn’t risk any sort of confrontation...”

She let Cadance babble, listening to the quick, clipped tone, and picking up on the critical wording she employed. She’d never seen the alicorn betray nervousness or discomfort before. Now, experiencing it, and the circuitous long-winded explanation she could not miss two new insights that broke upon her spinning mind.

She’s going to sacrifice me. But… she doesn’t want to.

She didn’t know why she did what she did next. She lifted a hoof to gently touch to Cadance’s lips, and stilled the still quickly babbled words. The archdemon simply going quietly cross-eyed to look at the hoof touching her snoot.

I just made a Princess stop talking.

She couldn’t stop the soft giggle that bubbled up out of her chest, nor the sniffling sob that followed it. To have such a surreal feeling of power, she’d only had to lose her family, her home, she flinched at the memory of her father’s scream and the roaring crackle of the inferno. All that had to happen, and she had to become the monster’s sacrifice, so that she could be here shushing a demonic alicorn with a hoof.

She swiped her other foreleg across her eyes as she tried to get a handle on herself. Her mind was racing, running around itself in circles as she digested the situation. “I-It’s okay… I think I’ve f-figured it o-out.” She took a shuddering breath. “A-am I e-enough?”

“I’m sorry.”

Green Leaves looked up in surprise, to see tears tracing down Cadance’s cheeks, those slitted eyes awash with more of them.

“I’m so… so very sorry. You’ve been through s-so much already. And here I am… about to t-take from you exactly what he planned to.” Her eyes squeezed shut tightly as she clutched a hoof against her cheek, wiping irritatedly at the tears as they fell. “It’s been so long since I… felt like a m-monster.”

She found herself pushing up against the larger alicorn, and this time there was no resistance, Cadance slumping miserably onto her side as the Earth Pony found herself on top, figuratively as well as literally. Why did all of this make her feel so calm? She clutched at the sobbing archdemon, and felt her forelegs clutch about her just as tightly. The joint popping extra-squeezy sort of hug only an Earth Pony could deliver, or translate.

No. You’re nothing like him. You care.

“You can’t take anything.” She heard herself reminding the still weeping alicorn. “Me being willing is the trick, isn’t it?”

“A willing… offering, is immeasurably more potent.” The archdemon mumbled softly. “Two souls offered… one willingly… and I can create a gateway to bring whoever I like… Even another Archfiend through.”

“Another… Twilight Sparkle, right?”

Cadance just nodded softly.

“Alright.. so the two of us make this gateway thing, and the Elements come back. And you’ll be able to d-deal with the Nobles then right?”

Another nod, Cadance just clinging to her like she would never let go.

Somehow, I don’t think I want you to… ever.

She took a slow sobbing breath, and let herself just lay atop Cadance’s barrel, nuzzling softly against the plushness of her pelt. “There’s something that I want...”

Once a day a guard brought buckets of slop to feed the prisoners of the Black Level in the Canterlot dungeons, ignoring the howls and jeers and cackles of his charges.

He preferred the quiet ones. Like Cell 37. The tiny slot opening, letting him dump the fetid muck in his pail into the trough. And not a peep from the occupant beyond the shifting of a heavy chain telling him he or she was still alive. He didn’t know any of the specific crimes of those who were buried here so far from the light and forgotten, nor did he really care to know. Being a Black Level inmate was analogous to being forgotten, and for good sane reasons.

Sliding the slot shut with a clang he moved to the next one, a mad babbler. Ignoring the insane jabber directed at him as he mechanically performed the actions he repeated at each and every cell before he could lock the door and forget these wretches for another day.

Behind him, deep in the darkness of her cell, prisoner 37 turned vacant eyes on the disgusting slop that had been her meals for… however long she had been in here. One lost track of time, down here in the dark. In any case, she wasn’t hungry at the moment. She returned to gazing at the floor about six inches in front of her filthy forehooves, unshorn fetlocks, cracked and uneven hooves. Ratty and matted mane and tail. She was a wreck of a mare, who in better times would have likely contemplated death if reduced to such a state.

But now there was nothing to bother her about her appearance as she gazed through the matted curtain of once blueish silver mane. Dull violet eyes gazing vacantly at the floor before her.

“Light the horn, build the charge, think of sparks and cheers. Let the magic flow, Whistler’s Shimmering Rocket Po-nnngh!” The suppressor on her horn did what it was meant to do, what it was made to do. It bled the magic out of the spell, letting a residual amount of the power feedback in proportion to the charge being produced. A warning to not try to cast magic with it in place. “Light the horn, build the charge, think of sparks and cheers. Let the magic flow, Whistler’s Shimmering Rocket Po-ngh!”

Again the spell fizzled, and the mare began to rock slowly side to side. “Light the horn, build the charge, think of sparks and cheers. Let the magic flow, Whistler’s Shimmering Rocket Po-nrgh! Th-thank y-you mares and g-gentlestallions… I’ll.. I’ll be here all night… L-light the horn, build the charge, think of sparks and cheers. Let the m-magic flow, Whistler’s Shimmering Rocket Po-hngh! D-don’t be alarmed… i-it’s all part of the act.”

Her swaying increased, eyes falling half closed, seeing something else all around her. The crowds, the smiles, the bright eyes of foals.. “Light the horn, build the charge, think of sparks and cheers. Let the magic flow, Whistler’s Shimmering Rocket Po-ugh!” A single spark from the feedback dropping before her face, momentarily lighting it before winking out, the dim light shining on filthy, tear stained cheeks. “T-the Great and P-powerful Trixie.. w-will show y-you things beyond.. I-imagination.” She hissed out softly, breath hitching in her throat..

“Light the horn, build the charge, think of sparks and cheers. Let the magic flow, Whistler’s Shimmering Rocket Po-nnngh!”

“L-light the horn, build the charge, think of sparks and cheers. Let the magic flow, Whistler’s Shimmering Rocket Po-nnngh!”

“Light the horn, build the ch-charge, think of sparks and ch-cheers. Let the magic flow…”

Author's Notes:

Whew... I'll apologize for stretching this out one more chapter before the summoning, but the pacing was just going to be weird and this was going to be a bonkers long chapter if I didn't cut it down. I hope you enjoyed it anyway!