Exhausted in mind and body, Tempest finally laid her whip down. For ages she had been laying into the mare strung out before her on the punishment rack for all she was worth, but the gleaming black suit Twilight wore was just as shining and intact as it was the moment Tempest had strapped the mare into place; and Tempest couldn’t resist taking the time to run her hoof along the princess’ perfect curves.

Captain Tempest was experienced in getting ponies to beg for a collar, crying out anything Tempest wanted to hear to her for her to stop using her whip, her horn, or any of the dozen or so instruments of pain and pleasure that lined the walls of the room. The unicorn could tell from Twilight’s reactions that her efforts had been somewhat effective, and that the suit the alicorn wore had been doing nothing to soften the strength of Tempest’s blows.

But through it all, the mare had refused to break, refused to say more than to ask if Tempest was done yet, refusing to beg for mercy or anything else. Now, Tempest had to wonder what it was that gave this Twilight Sparkle the strength to resist her. What made this mare so indomitable?

Moving close, Tempest lifted Twilight’s chin so that the two of them could look each other in the eye, and in those violet depths Tempest saw neither rage nor fear. Instead, there was the acceptance that while Twilight was in the unicorn’s power physically, her spirit was unbroken and would remain intact no matter what was done to her body.

“Would… would you like some water?” Tempest asked. There was something in those eyes. Some power that was reaching out to touch a part of her that nopony had touched in a very long time.

“Yes,” Twilight replied, and Tempest could feel the nod against her supporting hoof. “Are we done?”

“I… “ the unicorn began, ready to reassert her dominance over the alicorn, when it all seemed to rush out of her, like air out of a balloon. “Yes, we’re done. You were right, I can’t break you. I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry, Tempest?” Twilight asked, and in that question Tempest didn’t hear an accusation. Merely curiosity. “You’re a ruthless slaver whose job it is to break ponies of their will. You hurt ponies because ponies hurt you, isn’t that what you tell yourself? Isn’t that why you do what you do?”

“Ponies hurt me,” Tempest confirmed, turning away to grab a bucket of water. “Equestria abandoned me. Why shouldn’t I do the same to them? Why shouldn’t I do the same to you?”

“And yet you saved three fillies for no other reason that it was the right thing to do,” replied Twilight. “You aren’t a bad pony, even if you have been doing bad things.”

“I'm not a good pony either,” Tempest replied, placing the bucket within easy reach of Twilight’s mouth before moving around and undoing the first of many straps holding Twilight in place. “I just… I wanted every pony to feel my pain.”

“And you wanted them to hate you, which is the real reason why you spent all this time trying to break me,” Twilight said, pausing to dip her head down and take a quick drink. “You already knew I’d told you everything, you just wanted me to hate you because you think everypony should. You’ve been trying to make everyone around you either someone who serves you out of fear, or somepony who hates you because of what you’ve done to them because you feel that’s all you deserve.”

“Yeah…” Tempest confirmed, taking a moment to trace the pulsing mana lines that outlined Twilight’s hips. “Why didn’t you? Break that is.”

“Tempest, I’ve been whipped and beaten before, enough to know that you were holding back,” explained Twilight, leaning back a bit against Tempest’s hoof, the pain of the whip settling into a very pleasant afterglow. “I’ve been bound and broken before, but do you know what put me back together?”

“No,” Tempest replied honestly, as buckles and strips slithered their way off Twilight.

“Friendship, Tempest,” answered Twilight. “My friends helped put me back together, but I’m not the same mare that I was before, because some of the pieces got put back in a little wrong. Do you want to know a secret?”

“Um, okay?” Tempest gulped, coming nose to nose with Twilight as she undid the lines tethering Twilight’s collar in place.

“I don’t have to wear this suit or the collar anymore. I know how to get them off of me,” Twilight whispered, directly into Tempest’s shivering ear. “I wear the suit and the collar because they help keep me together, because as long as I can feel them pressing tight against my skin I know nothing has the strength to tear me apart.”

“But you’re its prisoner, its captive,” Tempest replied, her pulse beating fast as a hot blush filled her cheeks.

“We’re all held captive by something in our lives,” Twilight said softly, turning Tempest’s muzzle to face her in a mirror of the unicorn’s action a few minutes ago. “For me, it’s this suit and collar. For you, it’s your pain and anger, and I think you’re chained by those more than I’m bound by this suit.”

“I…” Tempest tried to respond, a visible gulp making her throat pulse. She hadn’t felt this vulnerable, this pure, in a long, long, time.

“Let me help you Tempest,” Twilight said, the two mares mouths almost touching. “Let me be your friend.”

“What if I want… need more?” Tempest asked, held in the grip of emotions she couldn’t name, let alone understand. “What if I need more?”

“Then that’s what—” Twilight began, the two mares moving toward each other to close that final gap.

“TEMPEST!” yelled Grubber, bursting in. The two mares leapt apart like someone had dumped a bushel of poison joke between them, crimson blushes burning their faces.

“Oh dang,” the hedgehog said, realizing his entrance might not have been timed terribly well. “Um… sorry to bother you but—”

“What is it?” Tempest asked with a long suffering voice.

“Well, it’s uh…” Grubber equivocated, shooting looks at the obviously unrestrained alicorn behind his commander.

“OUT WITH IT!” Tempest ordered, channelling her embarrassment at being caught in an intimate moment into a distinctly different emotion.

“That pegasus, the one we caught with her,” Grubber began, gesturing towards Twilight. “She broke loose and made for the forward hold. The troops tried to stop her but <urk!>”

The hedgehog arched his back as a series of blue feathers appeared on top of one shoulder, drawing him back, while something pressed his torso forward.

“Go ahead,” said a quiet voice, like silk on steel. “Tell your boss what I did, and I might let you live.”

“She pretty much tore through them all,” Grubber blurted out. “I don’t think we’ve got a single able-bodied soldier left. Can I not get killed now?”

“Fine,” grunted Dashiel, pushing the hedgehog aside to reveal that her extended war wing had been against Grubber’s back. The warrior was nearly covered by a mix of blood and debris, but for all that she wore a small satisfied grin.

“I’m glad you’re alright. Where’s Trixie?” Twilight asked, feeling a sudden chill come over her as she realized Dashiel was carrying the end of a leash in her flesh and blood wing. Her suspicions were confirmed a moment later as Trixie stepped into view, her body from the neck down fully encased in a suit of living latex, its mana lines pulsing with power siphoned off of the unicorn.

Despite the fact that a control collar was closely fitted around her throat and the leash to it was firmly held by another, Trixie stood proudly before Twilight’s visual inspection.

“What happened?” Twilight asked, crossing the few steps between her and her knight, checking to make sure the suit was functioning properly.

“This one,” Trixie began, “put Trixie and her Control into a sex trap meant to break us, or at least to tire us out enough that we couldn’t get free. Luckily for 144, the captain did not know that Trixie is an escape artist.”

“Dashiel?” Twilight asked, arching an eyebrow and packing an acre of meaning into that one word question.

“After Trixie got us out, we were a little uh… overheated,” Dashiel replied, and Twilight couldn’t help but smile a bit as the war weary pegasus blushed in a manner that was at total odds with her usual gruff demeanor. “So to uh… put the fire out, we kind of um… bucked.”

“We bucked! Okay?” the pegasus admitted, as Twilight's smile grew. “We were so worked up that I didn’t even notice that she’d put the thing holding the suit up her—”

“Place where her second tail is now,” Trixie butted in with. “144 is not sure she will get used to the feeling of that thing moving around inside of her, but she is going to have fun trying!”

When Twilight had first heard Trixie refer to herself as “144” a chill had stolen through her, but seeing Trixie and Dashiel interact like they were was putting the fear of Trixie becoming another 143 to rest. Twilight noticed that Dashiel had yet to let go of the leash connected to Trixie’s control collar, not to mention the occasional glances Trixie was giving to Dashiel’s muscular rear.

“Anyway, so that happened, and it’s one of the old original suits so it was either get a collar on Trixie and be her Control, or let her get suffocated,” Dashiel finished up with. “I had to go through a few guards to get to our stuff, but it wasn’t much trouble.”

“You took out nearly three dozen soldiers in like, two minutes!” Grubber exclaimed. “Not to mention blowing your way through two doors.”

Twilight held up a hoof to interrupt the indignant hedgehog to ask, “Why ‘144’?”

“144 requested it of her Control,” Trixie answered, stepping up to stroke her cheek against Dashiel’s flank like a cat. Dashiel’s blush went almost as red as Tempest’s fur.

“Suit 144, muzzle,” Dashiel commanded, and the suit responded by clamping the unicorn’s mouth closed with extruded bands of latex, muzzling Trixie. In spite of the silencing material, all present could somehow hear Trixie snickering away.

“Are you ponies always like this?” Tempest asked, and Twilight could hear the envy in her voice at the easy interaction between the head of the Twilight Guard and Twilight’s Knight.

“Not always, and we weren’t always like this,” Twilight explained. “But all of the ponies around me have come back from something that should have shattered them into tiny pieces.”

“And you put them back together with Friendship,” Tempest filled in, watching as Dashiel ordered Trixie’s suit to return back to normal..

“Friendship, and sometimes a little more, to be fully honest,” Twilight admitted.

“Welp, this expedition sure has been shattered,” Grubber observed. “One ship left, and we’ve maybe got enough crew to fly home, at which point the Storm King is gonna bust us.”

“If we’re lucky,” Tempest noted. “I think we’ll head for Kludgetown, sell the ship there and let all the ponies go and then go into hiding ourselves until the Storm King stops looking for us. If that’s okay, Twilight?”

“Why are you asking me?” Twilight asked. She was sure that practicality and a change of heart were equally behind Tempest’s decision, but she wanted the mare to say it for herself.

“Because the three of you have proved you can take us down if you really want to. Because there is no way we could keep the ponies we’ve taken, not to mention take care of them,” the broken horned unicorn took a deep breath before adding, “and most of all, because I don’t want to hurt ponies anymore, because I don’t want to hurt anymore.”

Twilight hugged the unicorn, who stood stock still for a moment, unsure of what to do with the unfamiliar gesture of comfort. At last, the larger pony bent her head onto Twilight’s shoulder and awkwardly returned the hug.

“What am I seeing?” the hedgehog first mate asked, completely confused by what he was observing.

“Trixie’s princess is the Princess of Friendship,” the mare stated proudly. “This is why we follow her.”

“You know Tempest, there’s this thing called the Staff of—” began Grubber, perking up.

“No,” Tempest said, cutting him off as she lifted her head from Twilight’s shoulder. “No more using ponies for the Storm King. No more hurting ponies.”

“Fine, but we can’t just dump off the ones we have here,” Grubber replied. “There’s still a giant centaur raging around the countryside, and eventually he’s gonna cross the desert to Kludgetown, and then what?”

“He’s got a point,” Tempest admitted, breaking the hug to look Twilight in the eyes. “We’ll never make an ocean crossing like we are now, and Tirek will find us eventually, plus I’ve kind of ruined your plan to stop him.”

“There’s always the direct approach,” Dashiel said grimly. “He may have all the magic in Equestria, but he’s also a huge target. This ship has shocknets and I bet cannons too.”

“We tried that first,” Tempest told the pegasus. “And yeah, we hurt him, but the problem was that even our iron cannonballs couldn’t penetrate deep enough to hit anything vital. That’s when he showed us that even with our ships and armor being made to resist magic he could still hurt us a lot more than we could hurt him.”

“Why are your cannonballs made out of iron instead of the metal of your armor?” Twilight asked.

“Huh?” nearly everyone asked Twilight at once.

“Well, it seems to me that cannonballs made out of the same metal as your armor would work a lot better than just iron,” Twilight stated, before looking around to see the confused and incredulous looks being given her. “What? You’ve never thought of it?”

“Well, no… I mean, it’s armor!” Tempest replied. “And besides, I don’t know if it’s even possible. Grubber?”

“Well yeah, we could make cannonballs out of it, but it would mean stripping the ship of its armor or I guess you could cover the ball in a skin of it, but that would make the cannonballs bigger and they wouldn’t fit in the cannons,” replied Tempest’s companion.

“We could make the bores bigger to fit, I guess…” Tempest paused, her mind leaping ahead even as her eyes narrowed dangerously. “Wait a minute Princess, are you asking us to take on Tirek for you? After what he did to us? You didn't come here with a backup plan?”

“Our plan to get that suit onto Tirek and use it to capture and contain him was the preferred option, but with it on Trixie now, the only option left is to go after him head on and force him to release the Equestrian magic he’s absorbed,” Twilight replied, frowning and looking down. “The only way we can do that is be a credible threat to him.”

“There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there?” Tempest asked, her expression one of wary hurtfulness. “Are you sure you didn’t come here planning to use me? There’s no way the suit on your unicorn there would fit over one of Tirek’s hooves, never mind his whole body.”

“The suit grows to cover whoever it’s put on, and the more magic on the target, the faster it gets covered. So with all of Tirek’s magic he would have been covered in less than a minute,” Twilight replied, adding, “what I wasn’t saying was that what I’d like to do is come back with my friends and the Elements of Harmony and use them on Tirek instead. But one of them is… indisposed, maybe permanently, and I need all of them for the Elements to work.”

Tempest didn’t need to know about how her friend Rarity had fused with the Nightmare Spirit to become Nightmare Rarity, latex sorceress supreme and one third of a confusing polygamous triad with her brother and sister-in-law. Twilight wasn’t sure if Rarity was still connected to the Element of Generosity, and she didn’t want to test that in what could be a life or death situation.

“The best way ahead is on your own,” Tempest quipped, nodding in understanding. “We aren’t heroes, Princess, and we are on our own. I’ve barely got enough sailors left to run the ship, let alone fight a mad centaur.”

“What if you had more?” asked a new voice, and every eye in the cabin grew wide as Starlight Glimmer walked into the compartment. The unicorn strode confidently forward, looking in surprisingly good condition for somepony who had been chained into a breeding rack for days on end.

“Cloak? How?” Tempest demanded, shifting to the name she knew Starlight by in her shock and surprise. Twilight, meanwhile, looked at the mare with a healthy dose of skepticism. This pony was a far cry from the rage-maddened mare who’d had to be sedated in order to avoid wrecking the ship.

“Give a pony a potion often enough, and they develop an immunity to it,” Starlight explained, stopping just over a full body length away from Twilight. “Though it will still have some effect, which it does. And you never did put a cap on my horn. Did you really think I believed you when you said I had to stay in that rack all the time?”

“Well… I mean, it did help with your cloaking spell,” Tempest replied.

“It did, but it was pretty obvious that the only reason you kept me there was because you like having ponies all tied up,” Starlight replied with a smirk. “And that you were just a little bit afraid of me.”

“If I hadn’t needed you for the spell, you’d be wearing a bridle right now,” Tempest shot back, channeling her anger once more. “In fact, maybe you should be wearing one now.”

“First, I’d like to see you try,” Glimmer replied, with an air of superiority. “Second, you still need me… And my followers.”

“Followers?” Twilight asked, more to try to understand this Starlight compared to the one she knew. The last time she had seen this pony she had been stark raving mad, but now she seemed fully calm and cogent.

“After I killed you, or rather my world’s version of you, Equality began to spread from my one little town to all of Equestria,” Starlight said, and as she looked at Twilight the alicorn could see that the fires of madness still danced in the mare’s eyes, under control but unabated. “Celestia and Luna were even considering stepping down as more and more ponies joined my Equalists. The reason you’ve had so few problems, Captain Tempest, is that I told my ponies not to cause any trouble.”

“You were going to take the ship, weren’t you?” Tempest asked, her tactician’s mind putting the pieces together.

“We were going to make our move once you were out over the ocean,” Starlight confirmed. “The yetis would likely go overboard, but you and your sailors would be invited to become Equalists.”

“Or die,” Tempest shot back, which Starlight gave an answering nod to.

“But that doesn’t matter now,” Starlight continued. “What does matter is that if I give the word, my ponies will join your crew and you’ll have all the help you need to take on Tirek.”

“Why would you help me?” Tempest asked.

“Because she gets to be the hero who saved Equestria,” Dashiel stated, jumping into the conversation. “And with the Princesses out of the way thanks to Tirek, that puts the throne practically in her hoof. Princess Starlight Glimmer.”

“Prime Minister Glimmer,” corrected the mare, and the smirk was a full smile now. “There would be a democratic election first, of course. And with all ponies being equal, they should all get a say about whose in charge.”

“But with so many ponies being part of your… philosophy,” Twilight added, managing to cut off the word “cult” in time. “The outcome is practically predetermined.”

“Equality shall cover Equestria!” Glimmer loudly proclaimed. “With my guiding hoof, and the captain here as the Grand Admiral of our armed forces, Equestria will rise from the ashes to a future brighter than the sun itself!”

“Wait, ‘Grand Admiral’?” Tempest asked, looking suspiciously at her former captive. “Why would you let me anywhere near a military, especially your military?”

“Think about it,” the unicorn passionately declared. “Who better than the mare who commanded the ship that saved Equestria in its darkest hour? Who better than Captain Tempest, the hero who strode out of the shadows to save us all? A true Equestrian hero of Equality.”

“I don’t even know what Equalism is!” Tempest protested. “And I’m no hero.”

“Your crew has yetis, hedgehogs, ponies, parakeets and more,” Starlight pressed. “You may not know the words, but you follow the creed. Everyone who serves you, serves you equally.”

Twilight wanted to interrupt and say that it was Harmony not Equality that was the underlying reason Tempest’s crew worked together, but she could see the effect Starlight’s speech was having on the broken horned unicorn.

“No Equestrian would accept me, not with the way my horn makes my magic work,” Tempest argued, but both Twilight and Starlight could tell it was more Tempest’s poor self-image raising the objection than any real rejection of the idea.

“That makes you more heroic, not less. By working everyone in your crew as equals you will have succeeded where everypony else has failed,” Starlight preached, and as Tempest’s head came up the chief proponent of Equality pressed in one last time. “You can be a hero, praised equally by everypony, and I swear, as Prime Minister of Equestria, I’ll do everything in my power to see your horn restored. If that’s what you really want.”

“A hero,“ Tempest echoed, nodding her head in affirmation as the idea took hold. “Let’s do it. Grubber, let’s get all the able-bodied crew together and see who’s with us. Cloak… I mean Starlight, let’s go free some slaves!”

“I’ll be with you in a moment,” Glimmer replied, with a warm smile. “Princess Twilight and I need a second to chat.”

“Okay, meet you in the cargo hold in five minutes,” Tempest replied, adding, “Twilight, we’re going to need you and your ponies too.”

Twilight nodded her agreement as Tempest and Grubber left the compartment. The four remaining mares all waited until they were sure they were alone.

“Starlight, I just wanted to—” Twilight began, before the unicorn cut her off.

“I’m going to say this once and once only,” Glimmer hissed, her voice suddenly full of barely contained rage. “I only need you for as long as it takes to get rid of Tirek. After that, I fully intend to kill you again.”

“But why?” Twilight gasped in shock, barely noticing that Dashiel had dropped Trixie’s leash and was fully prepared to spring toward the threat to her primary.

“Because you’re Twilight Sparkle. Alicorn Princess of Friendship,” responded that hate filled voice beneath venomous eyes. “I know how close you came to winning the last time we fought, and I plan on putting you down again before you can prevent me from having everything I want.”

“But I’m not that Twilight,” the alicorn tried to explain.

“Doesn’t matter,” Starlight Glimmer, harshly cutting off Twilight again. “You are who you are, and I am who I am. Once Tirek is taken care of, one of us is going to die… again.”

As Twilight tried to think of a response, the unicorn stomped out of the room past a bristling Dashiel.

“Princess,” Dashiel said, a few moments later. “That mare is going to be a problem. You want me to solve it?”

As of tomorrow, I will have been writing for 7 years, and as of the publishing of this chapter will have written over 965,000 words.

Damn.