That she might smell lilacs was a terrifying notion to Blackbird, who circled overhead like an opportunistic vulture. If she caught even the faintest whiff of the floral scent, she was to flee with all due haste. The gas was heavy and she was up high, but the fear remained, lingering like one of Dim’s smoke-creatures. Below her was a nightmarish scene of carnage; everything was on fire, both creatures and objects alike. An orgy of bloody violence was taking place, with both the dreadful gas and Dim’s horrible spell having unraveled the minds of all exposed.

She watched, she waited, and she had the most horrendous view of everything down below. A black silhouette could be seen, it stood out in sharp contrast to the lurid orange glow of the billowing, devouring flames. Something flapped, trying to escape, and she couldn’t tell if it was a pegasus or a griffon. It didn’t matter, not really. Whatever it was, it was suffering, and so shooting it would be a mercy.

At least, that is what Blackbird told herself.

Taking aim with her long barreled ten gauge, she peeped down the iron sights and waited for the creature to gain a little more altitude. Something about the weight and solidity of the shotgun was reassuring to her. It was a storied weapon, heavy, impractical for many, but not her. No, for her, it was perfect. While she drew a bead on what was revealed to be a griffon with a musket, a thought rose unbidden in her mind.

I shall call you ‘Mercy’s Reach’ her inner voice said while her talon-finger curled around the comforting curve of the trigger. Mercy has a mighty long reach.

Exhaling, Blackbird fired and there was a thunderous report that rent the night.

A cloud of lead, smoke, and flame was spat out and the bright muzzle flash dazzled Blackbird’s eyes. These shells had been overloaded—terrifyingly so—and the recoil was like a mighty mule kick that jolted her whole body. She had aimed for center mass—her iron sights had been trained on the section of spine just between the wings—but the cloud of lead, smoke, and flame connected with the base of the griffon’s neck with explosive results.

The decapitated griffon somersaulted from the force of impact and tumbled out of the sky, spurting blood and viscera from the gaping, yawning wound where his neck once connected to his body. His talon-fingers lost their grip on the musket, and it too, tumbled down, falling end over end. It had happened again, much to Blackbird’s horror. She had aimed for a perfect shot… she was certain she had fired when pointing at center mass… but once again she had achieved spectacularly bloody results.

Bile burned the back of her throat.

Another rose to escape and Blackbird was forced to steel her resolve. Before this night was done, many would die. These creatures needed to die, she reminded herself, they needed to die so that others might live. Though some doubts remained, she had almost convinced herself of the the rightness of her actions, her cause. She sucked in a deep breath that tasted of smoke, held it, drew a bead, and when she exhaled she squeezed the trigger with gentle, but firm force. This time, a pegasus met a terrible end, and having lost a wing, tumbled down to the carnage below.

These were not good creatures… no, these were creatures given to vice, debauchery, and iniquity. They were called bandits for a good reason, having given up on making an honest living and instead taking whatever it was they felt as though they were owed. Honest goodness had been replaced with gross moral turpitude. As such, these creatures, weak-willed, weak-minded, had heavy consciences weighted down with their depravity.

The spirit that plagued them had become gluttonous from their wantonness, their impropriety, their reckless profligacy—in short, they were easy targets. As the green miasma lept from mind to mind, it turned the whites of the eyes to a sickly shade of luminescent green in every creature it preyed upon, imbuing them with a ghastly, hateful glow. Under the influence of the discordant spirit, they accused one another of every vile thing, every horrible act, every lurking suspicion. Their paranoia took over; being bandits, they knew that they were bandits, and as such, none of them could be trusted, not a one.

They killed one another without mercy, which only made things worse. Few things weighed down the simple minded like the heavy guilt of murder, and so everything descended into absolute and total chaos. Earth ponies trampled their former friends, rendering them bloody with powerful blows. Griffons tore out throats with claws and pecked out eyes with beaks. Pegasus ponies pummeled while flitting about. All of this took place while the fort burned around them, the bright orange flames reaching up into the night sky like greedy, grabbing fingers.

The cause of it all was a hat, now quite tattered and by hat standards, on the verge of death. Many holes had been shot through it, ragged tears had been made, and it smouldered from the devouring inferno. It moved about, a peculiar guardian of the exit, spewing fire and killing any who tried to flee through the gate. Upon the world of Terra, death came in many forms; titans, behemoths, leviathans, dragons, arimaspi monsters, cyclops, ogres, trolls… but for these creatures, the cause of their demise was a hat—a strange fate indeed, and a far stranger tale to tell Death when she came to collect their souls.

The overpowering fragrance of lilacs lingered upon the air like sweet perfume…

Above the mayhem, Blackbird found herself dogfighting with those attempting escape. She battled now with pistols akimbo, snapping off quick shots. By some miraculous stroke of luck, each bullet seemed to strike a fatal or crippling shot. Though she aimed for center mass just as her mother had taught her to do, her bullets found their way to heads, necks, wings, and limbs. To miss center mass with each and every shot, only to strike critical blows on vulnerable extremities, Blackbird couldn’t tell if she had extraordinary luck or some dreadful curse.

Heads burst like lanced boils. Limbs were blown clean off and the arterial spurting that followed created delicate fountains of bright scarlet blood that glistened in the firelight. Blackbird flew with lateral motion, just as her mother taught her, strafing and moving at odd angles while surrounded in billowing clouds of gunsmoke. She was running out of revolvers and would have to reload soon, which worried her.

A group rose to meet her and miniballs whizzed around her, with one grazing the feathers on her left wing. She holstered her revolvers, flapped to gain altitude while maintaining lateral movement, and unslung Mercy’s Reach, which needed a reload. Remembering the shells that Dim had given her, she shoved a few in with her thumb-talon and then snapped the revolving cylinder shut. Lifting the long-barreled ten gauge, she took steady aim…

BLAM!

Mercy’s Reach belched fire like a dragon and the briny scent of the ocean filled the air, a strangely salty smell. The crowd was stricken with explosive wounds—injuries the likes of which Blackbird had never seen. Skin steamed and sizzled while enormous, gaping wounds happened just like magic. The salty stench of gunpowder, burned hair, scorched feathers, and seared meat made her eyes water. What had Dim packed into these shells?

Squinting because of the stinging, salty smoke, she fired again into the mob, and this too produced explosive results. The wounds seemed to ignite and burn, with tongues of flame lapping at the jagged, torn edges of flesh. Those unlucky few that survived the fiery, salty onslaught tumbled out of the night sky to meet their fate in the flaming, murderous chaos below. The smoke that rose from the burned, blasted bodies was so salty that it almost made Blackbird choke, and her vision blurred with stinging tears.

Blinking away tears, Blackbird tried to clear her vision so that she might clear the skies…

The creaking of timbers moaned over the sound of roaring flames, gunshots, and the sounds of violence. At the far side of the fort away from the gate, the ground began to ripple and the wooden palisades wiggled like loosened teeth, jostling against one another. From somewhere deep within the ground, there was a groan, followed by a grating rumble, like two heavy stones sliding along one another, the sort of sound that put one’s teeth on edge.

Fire—like a spreading cancer—had lept to the main keep itself and was edging closer to the barrels stacked beneath the lean-to roof built off from one side of the log keep. The roaring crackling flames spat cinders out like colonists seeking new lands, and new things ignited. Thick, roiling smoke rose like pillars that held up the canopy of the heavens.

A massive shudder rocked the fort’s motte; that is to say, the hill that the fort had been constructed upon. It moved—it shivered—and everything built atop of it began to lean at precarious angles. The ground quivered, gave a violent tremble and then the far side of the fort, the side away from the gate spilled its stony guts. Rocks—a great many of them—exploded from out of the side of the hill, the very foundation of the fort itself. These rocks had once dinged the plows of farmers and over time, they had been rounded up and placed in a rock pile. With the passing of time, this pile grew and grew, until one day it was covered in dirt, turned into a motte, and had a bailey constructed upon its crown.

But now these stones spilled out like viscera from a gash in the soil, and the palisades began to lean as the foundation gave way. The ground tilted, a great deal this time, and all of the stacked barrels toppled over. They rolled down the incline, bounding and bopping one another, smashing any creature unfortunate enough to be in their path, until they reached the flaming palisades.

Blackbird watched in awe as the hill itself came apart and the landslide of stones spilled forth from about the middle of the steep incline. The once level ground at the top of the rise was now slanted—very much so—and everything leaned as the fort toppled. Barrels, dozens of them, were pitched from their lean-to shelter and went bounding down the incline, smashing and killing anything in their way.

When the first barrel smashed into the burning palisades, Blackbird realised what was about to happen and she turned tail, fleeing as fast as her wings would carry her. Seconds later, she felt it, the burning, searing heat at her backside, she felt the sound and heard the fury that echoed through her ears, almost deafening her. It was a sound so loud that it ceased being a sound at all, and became a sensation instead, an indescribable one. The concussive force struck her and sent her spiraling out of control while a pillar of fire rose like a vulgar raised finger in the night, which was now bright as day.

Blackbird was certain that her eyeballs would burst from their sockets and she squeezed her eyes shut in a vain attempt to hold them in. The shockwave rippled through her body, turning her bowels into water, which she could feel spraying out behind her while the crushing force constricted around her body. A searing heat singed her from tail to nose and she felt her skin grow tight, as if she had a terrible sunburn.

Still, somehow, Blackbird flew. Whatever luck she had sustained her and she flew blind out of the billowing column of fire that expanded all around her like an unfolding roll of parchment. She emerged smouldering, missing a few patches of her fine black pelt, and she struggled to level out her staggered flight. Behind her, the pillar of flames grew ever taller, and now reached several hundred feet into the night sky, a towering colossus of fiery fury.

Now perched in the gnarled crotch of a tree, Blackbird surveyed the devastation, not that much could be seen just yet. Most of the hill was gone and stones were everywhere. Sharpened wooden logs lay scattered about like toothpicks, many of which were on fire. The keep was gone, it had simply ceased to exist when the powderkegs had gone off. How many hundreds of pounds of black powder had detonated was unknown, but Blackbird guessed that it was a whole bloody lot. What little bit of the hill that remained could now be called a crater.

Never in her life had she seen anything quite like this and her mind struggled to take it all in. A few unicorns working together had done this. Of course she had her own role in it, but picking off the escapees paled in comparison to leveling a fort and the hill it stood upon. This… this was only a minor example of the sort of horrors of war that could be expected if all of the world plunged into conflict. Instead of bandit forts built on a hill, whole cities could be razed.

It made her feel small, insecure, it left her vulnerable and she wished that her father was here to comfort her. But Stinkberry was gone. He was dead and the dead had no fear of war. She rubbed her stinging eyes, blinked a few times, and tried to clear her vision. Black ashes drifted down like dirty snowflakes borne upon scorching winds.

From beside her, there was a pop, like a cork yanked free from a bottle and Dim appeared, hatless. When she turned to look at him, she saw his stoic, unfeeling expression, the utter lack of emotion upon his face, and for a few seconds, she hated him. Hot resentment burned within her breast and her breath shot out of her swollen, snot and ash-clogged nostrils like cannon-fire. But then the feeling passed and she was grateful to see Dim, because he had come looking for her.

He cared, even if he didn’t show it.

“Motte and Bailey are fine, I found them already. How are you, Blackbird?”

She blinked and ashen tears dribbled down her cheeks while she replied, “I don’t know.”

Dim, standing on a tree branch, lowered his head and studied her. As for Blackbird, her heart ached in some odd way and the hard, unyielding bark of the tree pressed cruelly into her tender hide. She wanted her father—her mother—anypony really. But Dim was stoic, cold, he was utterly indifferent. The bodies in the crater were just that—bodies—and probably meant nothing to him, but she couldn’t steel her heart to be so apathetic to the slaughter that had just taken place.

Much to Blackbird’s surprise, Dim came closer, and while she tried to recover her shocked senses, she felt a soft nuzzle against her neck. The unexpected affection, this kind act, she wasn’t expecting it, not at all, and it left her as shell-shocked as the powderkeg explosion that had just taken place. When she reached out for him, she almost knocked him from the branch, but she pulled him into her safe embrace.

He was small, compared to her, fragile, little more than skin, bones, and indomitable willpower. When she breathed in his scent, she smelled smoke, acrid sweat, and cloves, but he always smelled like cloves. Her talon-fingers ached; she had burned the tips with so many hot reloads and then had burned the blisters too. Everything ached, her heart most of all, but holding Dim made everything better.

Dim was cold and she could feel the way his muscles tensed, as if he was trying not to shiver. She pulled him a bit closer, rubbing his body against hers, and the pleasant friction made a delightful warmth between them. The pony she held had almost no weight to him, as if there was nothing solid nor substantial about him. He was so small, slight, and fragile—but capable of so much devastation.

The duality of it all left her feeling withdrawn and confused.

“It was a puppet spell…” Dim almost sighed out these words.

“Say again?” For some reason, the idle chatter made Blackbird feel better, and she longed for a distraction.

“It was a spell for puppeteering. When I was a colt, I found the spell in some dusty tome that had been sorely neglected. I spent weeks trying to learn the spell, it was far more complicated than it first appeared. But learn it I did and I gave my toys a sort of pseudo-life. I was so pleased with myself… but then my mother found out and she became enraged. Such a spell was beneath me, she said. It was frivolous, meaningless magic. She stole my joy… my happiness… it was… it was a triumph for me. With but a thought I could bring all of my toys to life, I could make them dance and entertain me and Darling. But my mother had to punish me for my gaiety.”

The words left Blackbird flummoxed.

Dim sighed and then rested his head against her neck. She struggled, trying to understand his pain, trying to understand him, but try as she might, he remained a mystery. He had just used a spell intended to entertain foals to help sack a fort and take who knows how many lives, but that was sort of what he did. When cast by Dim, no spell maintained its innocence for long.

Holding Dim to keep him warm, she watched as the fires burned.

Author's Notes:

Sodium and water reaction. Basic science.

Don't get it wet, Dim had said.