I did it the next night, when we were together and the Count was inside me. Lying on his back, he let me take control, to move my hips in my own time. We reeked of sweat and sex, a panting, wet mess of bedsheets and mutual pleasure.

I lowered my barrel to his, finding his neck with my lips, feeling the hastened thump-thump-thump of his blood through his jugular, in rhythm with the throbbing of his flesh within me, and then moving lower, caressing and tasting, the wave of my flowing mane sweeping over him like an aftershock of bites and kisses.

My tongue snaked in between the coat of his chest, finding the bare skin, and then went deeper. With a spark of emerald, it darted through, and I tasted salt and iron beneath, probing deeper and deeper beneath his skin, pulling the wound wider with my tongue and my hooves.

His breath caught with the sudden stimulation, and his hips rolled and surged, hitting deep and strong, forcing me to moan with pleasure. It surged through me, up the spine and through my horn, weaving into the spell I was doing, fuelling the green and the black that poured into the widening wound, and I watched the spell bloom in sync with the heat that was building in my nethers, coiling around his heart, spreading its tendrils up his spine and into his veins.

I closed my eyes, shuddering with pleasure, but still, I could see his figure, a skinless creature of arteries, muscles and organs lit from within by the green of my magic -- a macabre exhibit of anatomical theatre thrusting and writhing in the empty darkness, the poison flower of my spell growing within.

He wheezed and and rasped beneath me, but he couldn’t stop the movement of his hips, thrusting deeper and deeper into me, bringing me closer to the point of no return, even as I delved inside of him with my magic in turn - a debased, perverted union of lust and sorcery.

“Faster...”
“More...”
“Close...”

Whether he said it or I didn’t matter. It was a perfect unity of will and passion, magic turning my whispers to his desires, to the movement of the bodies, to the mingling of the flesh and fluids. And then, inevitably the whiteness exploded from beneath like a nova, flashing through me like lighting and I arched my back and gripped him tight inside me, my horn pulling on the green strings of the spellcraft.

My target slipped through the gash in his skin, and his eyes widened as he saw his own heart, severed from his body, floating in the air in front of my face. It rotated slowly, suspended by the thin threads of my magic, still dripping blood and ichor that left black stains on the whiteness of his coat.

“Wha…” he tried to speak up, but it was too late. His own release had found him, and he gripped my flanks and pulled me in closer, pouring inside of me.

He orgasmed as he died, the twitches of his flesh inside me merging with the last fits of his agony, ichor dripping of his bleeding heart like emeralds in the green grip of my magic. Not quite the blue blood claimed by nobility -- just regular Type Q.

Common as muck.

I rode his final thrusts out even as I levitated a leaden box to capture the heart, the click of the lock echoing his final pulse.

My horn sparked with a final bit of magic, and the green flower of my spell bloomed, pulsing with his blood and my power, a living, hungry thing intertwined with his body, shuddering with its own, alien life. A beat of the pulse, and another, the spell within him convulsing and pushing his blood through his veins. He drew a long, ragged breath, coming back to life, and opened his emerald-green eyes.

We fell apart, spent and out of breath. Chill night air breezed through the hairs of my coat caressing my foam-covered flanks, as I clutched the box with my prize to my chest.

“What…’’ he tried again. I could feel him move, touching his chest with his hoof, where I knew his flesh has already been re-knit into a thin scar by my magic. “What have you done to me?”

“I took your heart,” I said, still not entirely believing it myself. “And put my magic in its stead.”

“Why?”

I scoffed - that lesson I’ve already learned.

“Plomo o plata, my lord, a foundation for my trust. Your silver is your freedom from the arimaspi and this - this is your lead. Cross me over, leave me behind, try to go against my plan… even if you manage such a feat now, a witch like myself in possession of your heart will give you more than just a heartburn.”

“I should be afraid.” He wasn’t. “I should fear and hate you now. For tricking me, for binding me, for threatening me… but somehow I don’t.” There was a surprise in his voice, the detached curiosity of someone probing for a missing tooth with his tongue.

“You can say your heart just isn’t in it,” I could not resist the pun. “It’s my magic that beats in your chest, my little lord, and my will that keeps the blood flowing through your veins. You could no more wish to act against me than you could wish to act against your own heart.”

“But how…” he started, but I was growing tired of the pillow talk, of the explanations. The exhaustion of the spell and sex has caught up with me, and my hoof ran over the leaden box, spreading a little shine of emerald across its engravings.

“Sleep now, my little lord. Sleep and dream of me,” I whispered, and my will slipped into his heart, making his blood flow slower and his eyes close, carrying him away into the heavy slumber.

I snuggled closer, wiggling underneath his forehoof, trying to escape the evening chill, but somehow, despite the steady beating of my magic in his chest, he felt cold.

The hunger woke me early in the grey mists of not-quite-morning. Grasping half-blind in the darkness, I mixed and boiled and distilled, by long-ingrained rote, to put together a drink of mandrake root and rainbow essence, sour and spicy: a familiar morning cocktail, rich in sugar, propylhexedrine and amphetamines. It helped me to wake up and replenish my magic after the exercise of last night.

A cold shower chased away the rest of the exhaustion and Count's smell on my fur, and I was ready to meet the Prince and to see the sanctum sanctorum, the heart of Griffinstone. And yet, there still was time before our meeting.

Grabbing some wine -- a random bottle from the Count's collection-- I settled in one of his chairs, watching the dark skies out the window.

Even though I could see in the darkness easily enough, there wasn't much to see there, from this side of the castle -- rocks of Griffinstone and the waves that'd clash against them endlessly, and nothing more. A waste of empty space, with nothing known behind it.

And now we journeyed to the end of earth,
Remote, the Scoltan wild, a waste untrod.

Count's wine, Count's chair. Even the words that came to my mind from the old stuffy books Miss Edge let me take from the Baltimare school library were something he could've said, with his love of clever verse.

The plan -- my own plan this time, not arimaspi’s or the Count’s -- was still brewing in my mind, a machine of many moving parts, some risky, some as of yet unknown, but all of it beginning with this. Here and now was my last chance to back out. Last chance to change my mind.

Count’s wine, Count’s chair, Count’s silly, princess-y thoughts, long since alien to me.

I sat, and I watched the nothing past the window, and I drank the last of the wine, nursing each sip like a love affair. And then I stood up and went to see the Prince.

"You came!" Galad's soft sotto was almost as scream in the deafening darkness of the night. "I have almost feared..."

I have almost hoped I heard behind his voice. The princeling was losing his nerve.

His voice echoed through the damp hall, repeated back by the rough stone walls. For the very heart, the middle of Gormenghast this place looked lost and abandoned, neither dog or eagle to set foot in it for a while.

"So have I."

Nothing is more calming to the nerve of a young boy than to see someone more afraid than him. That was not the Count’s wisdom - it was something I heard some time ago, or perhaps in a dream. But it worked: in a blink he was at my side, covering me with his wing. “I would never!” he said, his wings twitching into mock-indignation. “Griffon word is as firm as a mountain!”

“I’m ready,” I said simply. “Shall we?”

“Oh, right, yes! I ought to be right here.” There was a chain on his neck, with an intricately-forged complex figurine that I would not have recognized as a key. It fit perfectly into the almost invisible keyhole in the wall.

"Gwyr gave it to me," the Prince explained. “On my fifteenth birthday. Said it was--" he swished Vagueness with his wing, "--just in case."

He couldn't turn it, though. Perhaps the thing had been unused for too long. Perhaps it was just too tight for his not-yet-grown claws. I seized the key, my magic overlaying his claw.

“Together.”

“Together.” He nodded, and we twisted. There came a click, and then a silent slide of metal on metal as the door turned, revealing a long, narrow tunnel, straight down, like a well to the centre of the earth itself.

The Prince grabbed the torch in his claw, and stepped through, hanging in the air. Only then had it dawned on him that we had a problem. We looked at each other, for one long second. Then I looked down. There was a lot of "down" to look at.

"Oh", Galad said. "I..."

"It's fine,” I assured him. It would not be an easy spell, but the halls of Gormenghast were damp after yesterday's storm, and I could work with that. My horn shone with light green auroras, pulling on the air around me, as the drops precipitated out of the air. Fog swirled around my knees, growing denser and solidifying until there was a soft surface of cloud beneath my hooves.

I pushed it forward and hung over the abyss of the shaft. Another spell later, I stepped on it slowly. The cloud, thin as it was, held.

"That's so cool." Prince flapped his wings, in excitement, swishing round my cloud. He landed by my side, careful not to damage the delicate weave of my magic with his claws.

"Is that a spell? You're a unicorn, but this is more like pegasi magic, right? I wish I could do that." his nervous chatter filled the silence in lieu of elevator music as we descended slowly, past the moss-ridden walls.

"Can't you?" I asked, "Griffons have their weather teams, don't they?"

"Griffons destroy, not create," the Prince sighed, staring at his claws. "Even with the weather -- we shepherd the winds and cull the clouds, but we cannot make them."

"Griffons have their own magic." I reached for the Prince's wing, unfurling it carefully and running my magic along the thick down of smaller feathers. "It is a marvellous thing too. I wish I could study it."

He blushed, his cheeks all aglow, and snapped his wing shut. "I promise, Lady, you will have all the time in the world to study our magic, once we're done here."

We kept descending through the darkness, watching the moss-covered walls crawl by. It took perhaps ten minutes to reach the bottom, and as I dismissed the cloud, our legs have finally touched the rough stone beneath.

In the wall of the shaft, we faced there was a door, almost invisible in the stone, with the same keyhole through which a feeble crimson light adding to the pale green shine of my horn, seeped into the tunnel.

Galad took his key again, turning it in the keyhole, and we entered a huge hall, and--

"Ice and Nightmares."

The familiar expletive, let loose from my lips, described what I saw almost perfectly.

That was precisely it -- in the room as large as Canterlot main hall, there was a tempest. A blizzard of ice and the fury of the howling winds, chained and contained by a spell. Perfectly, eerily quiet -- not even a breeze escaped the spell, not a single cry of the wind.

The lines of the spell were an elaborate pattern of dark crimson, winding, twisting spirals of words animated with eldritch amber light. It reminded me of a fantastically intricate, life-scale version of one of those maze things you can find on the back of a cereal box, but hidden as it was beneath ice and wind, I couldn’t even hope to discern where it would start or end.

The spellwork created by the pattern of the words contained a thing inside -- a creature, a beast so vast and inequine my mind refused to resolve the parts of it into a single shape. It was Boreas himself, the father of the Northern Winds. Only three anemoi, three other winds in all of the world could equal him in power.

"We must wait now," the Prince said, sitting down in the corner. "Soon my brother shall summon the winds, to fly to the West and arrange his clouds and build his hurricanes for that grand war of his. He always does that after he gets into a fight with Father. It's much easier to pass when the winds aren't all there.

I followed him, still unable to take my eyes of Boreas, chained within a pattern of the spell, crashing against his chains in eternal, unquenchable fury.

"They say the griffon king has first seen the pattern for this spell in a jewel hung from Celestia's neck after her victory over Chaos. “ The Prince said, “Others yet -- that he saw the seed of order in the eyes of Discord. And some believe it is merely a copy, a shadow of a greater binding below Mount Coltvir, chaining horrors one cannot even imagine -- but don't repeat this rumour in Griffinstone, lady, my compatriots would certainly dislike the notion."

His words hung in the air, dissolved by the eerie silence of the hall, and we sat quietly. Waiting, watching the winds in their eternal vortex, smashing and breaking against the thin crimson lines of the spellwork. Minutes, perhaps hours passed in the timelessness, until the waning of the winds has overtaken the waxing, the whirlwind dissolving into, well, thin air.

"Ah, the winds grow still," The Prince finally noted, perking up. "My brother has flown to the West. We should go.

"Follow me," the Prince guided me somewhere way to the back, to the entrance of the labyrinth only he could see. "Going through is hard, but it's not impossible," the Prince said, his voice taking Gwyr's intonations. He was clearly repeating what his brother must've told him. "Take it very slowly and don't let yourself be distracted. Don't be alarmed by the winds and the cold -- they can't hurt you, not when you’re with me. And most importantly -- keep walking. Don't stop, whatever you do, and don't stray from the path, and stay close to me or it'll probably kill you."

He put his claw on the tile between two crimson words, flowing almost like Arabian calligraphy. But these were not the ninety-nine Names of the powerful and mighty, fortuous and beneficent, possessing of all talents and capable in every magic under the Sun, Sultans of the Saddle Arabia.

"King Grover’s name is the first one,” the Prince said, making the first step in the labyrinth. "His son’s, and then his, and somewhere there -- my father and my brother’s name. The Blood of Griffon kings protects the Idol."

I followed him, hidden under his wing, step in step, name after name of Griffon kings in an unbroken chain, each adding their magic to protect their descendant from the incalculable fury of the Northern Wind.

Royal blood created the spell that bound the wind that could be used to protect those who carried the royal blood. It was, I appreciated, a near-perfectly closed system.

Its only weakness standing right by my side.

I do not remember much of my way through the pattern of the spell. There was too much power, too much noise, too much magic and all I could do was concentrate on was making a step, and then another, and then another still, my eyes bound to the tracery of crimson on the floor, counting the steps and the turns.

In the centre of a pattern was a circle. It was the eye of the storm, quiet again, and absent of all wind. Nothing moved there, and the air was still and stale.

In the centre of the circle, there was a pedestal of marble, upon which the Idol of Boreas stood -- a cup-like spiral of gold, marked with black script. And in the centre of the cup - a crimson-red gem, gleaming with so much power that I could barely even look at it straight.

But it was not the power of the gem, nor the golden filigree that attracted my attention. It was the writing etched into the gold of the cup: I’d know that hoofwriting anywhere.

The angular, uneven lines, the ragged cursive, the symbols that looked as if they would like nothing more than to jump off the page and stab you in the eyes -- I’ve seen it before - scribed with darkness In the Black Book of the Darkened Cutie-Mark, hidden in the furthest, most forbidden corners of the Canterlot Library, written on the scrolls every practitioner of black magic, every witch and every warlock hoarded like highest treasures: This was not written by the claw of any Griffon king, nor was it the power of Equestrian Princess. This was the hoofwriting of Starswirl the Bearded, the old bloody codger himself.

There, in the eye of the storm, in the center of the labyrinth under the eldritch light of the gem, the Prince had drawn his blood, and with it he had inscribed his own name after the names of his brother and his father, and the power rose about him, making for a moment his feathers white as hoarfrost, and his eyes as blue as ice.

There he laid his claw on my chest, his talons reaching into my soul and the mighty gale of his power extinguished the feeble light of my consciousness

You sought no friends! Alone, you lived your life,
Without those who shared your point of view.
Without remorse, you calmly thrust your knife
Into each heart that shared its love with you.

Fancy Pants, Count Hoofington.
"Imitations of the Poet"
Dedicated to S.