Ponies. Everywhere.

Luckily for Ditzy and I, we weren't too hungry to willingly corral ourselves into that test of patience in this school we happen to call “a line.” It wasn't really a line, though— just a massive crowd of pushing, shoving and shouting out the vilest profanity they could think of that blocked the entire display of food from the back. Just a hop, skip and a jump, and you're at the front of the line, not risking your life for a bowl of oatmeal.

Unlike the food, there were plenty of seats to accompany everypony and their acquaintances. Tables everywhere were perfectly aligned, parted by the other no more than just a few inches. As ponies sat on their haunches, engaged in breakfast and friendly conversation, as did the mailmare and I.

Resting my head on the table, I sighed heavily, salvaging what minutes I could have before the ringing of the school's golden bell could torture my ears. Through a gaze partially blocked off by hair that fell in front of one eye (though I was still too out of it to bother pushing it out the way) I lazily scanned the cafeteria and the ponies that inhabited it. Everything was as normal as it should be.  

"And if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong," Kill's voice quoted the most pessimistic line in history.

"What's the matter? Hard night studying?" the blonde mare asked, swallowing a bite of her muffin as she heard the sigh that was actually aimed at Kill.

"Ha, I wish." I chuckled at my own misery, rolling my eyes at the irony of that statement, knowing for a fact that I wasn’t as studious as I should be. At the corner of my eye, I spotted a dark brown stallion pegasus— somepony that I really could use a morning without. Bucking Tartarus. Dumbbells, I cursed myself.

"Hey, Graze!" the lone stallion called out as he approached my table. With each nearing hoofstep, my smile withdrew and faded, my darkening expression dragging down the eternal smile on Ditzy’s face. I wasn't very good at hiding my emotions, but I was extremely good at profanities, and through my silent, stoic expression that stared into blank space, I did what I do best—cursing the hell out of Kill for jinxing me.

In fact, I cursed him so much that I could place my bits where my mouth was and say that my mother was rolling in her grave.

"Is something wrong?" Ditzy finally brought herself to ask through the sudden moments of silence.

"Yes," I responded honestly, excusing myself from the table and approached the oncoming stallion. "What do you want, Dumbbells? Can't you see I'm enjoying a peaceful morning?"

"Well, I just came to pay my old pal, Graze, a visit," he said, stressing his body's weight onto me from forcefully resting his hoof onto my shoulder.

"No," I emotionlessly responded.

"No? What do you mean 'no'?" he repeated with a trickster's smile, knowing exactly what I was talking about.

"'No', as in, 'no, I'm not going to'," I answered his rhetorical question removing his weight off of me, shoving his weight off me, brushing off the remains of his coat from my black jacket. 

"Don't play foolish with me, Dumbbells. We go through the same routine everyday, and I assure you, you will forever get the same response," I explained coldly, leaving no room for him to continue his stupid game.

As my undeniable logic hit his ears, his miserable smile receded until somepony in the background caught his attention. "Is that a mare I see? Is she yours? Does she know that you're a bl—" his sentence was immediately interrupted with a firm, alice-blue hoof—my hoof to be specific, impacting his mouth, ensuring he got a refined taste of the 100% cotton my jacket was made of.

As Dumbbell fell to the floor with a thud, I eyed two stallions of orange and grey rise from their seats and drag their chairs off the floor, ready to jump in for their fallen ringleader. All they needed was the signal, and I wasn't going to allow that to happen.

Chats fell to hushed whispers, and whispers decreased to nothing but silence in no time at all. The cafeteria seemed to turn into a morgue as I was unceremoniously thrown into the center of attention. 

"You call them, Dumbbells, and I'll break every tooth in your bucking mouth," I promised. A breath of strained air flared through his nostrils and onto my hooves with a stare that could evenly match a cockatrice. I glared back with a reasoning, smaller force against his pearly whites. "Listen to me, Dumbbells, I've had a rough night, and a very good morning. Do not tempt me to do things we both are going to regret," I forewarned, retracting my hoof from his mouth with enough force to slingshot him back to the floor. "If you dare utter another mean word, I promise, I will break your snout."

Recovering from the fall, Dumbbells wiped the taste of my hoof from his mouth as he spat onto the floor. Now, if you listened closely enough, you could hear the tortured echoes of the university's janitor scream in pain as another hour's worth of hard work was marred by the stallion's spit.

Staggering back onto his four hooves, Dumbbells smirked at me as he approached and leaned in to whisper into my ear. "It's fine, Graze... you don't need to be mad at me, because you have to live with the fact that you're a blank flank."

Those last two words echoed through my mind and snapped the string, the embodiment of my inner peace and tolerance. Joy no longer had a say in this, his voice of reasoning was considered meaningless at this point onwards.

"Yikes, things are going to get a bit rowdy in here," Kill predicted as my actions leaned more toward his side. "Sorry, good old brother of mine," the devil conscience smirked to Joy from his respective shoulder, "but this is my time to shine..."

"Please don't, Kill," Joy pleaded with a bored quip that you could tell wasn't as bothered as it should have been.

"I'm sorry, Joy, but you know our rule. Once Graze leans toward either side, he needs something to act upon, and that at this very moment is me," Kill explained his point, disappearing from my shoulder as he left his twin alone to watch.

With an exasperated sigh, Joy rolled his eyes as a bored hoof supported his cheek, twiddling his golden angelic halo and spoke to himself, "I hate that rule."

"I am not a blank flank," I gritted my teeth with fully accounted aggression in my voice, even though  I kept it low enough for the ears of Dumbbells alone.

"Then, show it to me... in fact, show it to her," Dumbbells pointed a hoof towards the grey mailmare as the two other stallions, Score and Hoops, finally decided to side with their ringleader, seeing him no longer in a state to compromise. "Show her your cutiemark, Graze, or else, I'd let everypony on this compound know.”

"I do feel a little sore from that buck, guys, what do you say?" The creamy maned, middle pegasus leaned to his acquaintances as they cracked their necks and hooves in response. "The odds are three to one... so, you tell her, or we can forcefully get that cutiemark out of you."

"Actually, it's three to three," Kill's voice abruptly pointed out from wherever he had poofed to now. "You've got Joy and me, mostly me," he coughed, "here to back you up!"

What Kill had said finally gave Joy the opportunity to rightfully strike him down and his rash assumption. "Technically, no... we don't count since we can't physically do anything. But, you are right on one thing—we are here to back you up Graze," Joy supported me with a confident pat on the neck.

"So, what's it going to be? Are you gonna show us, or do we have to force it outta you?" the ringleader questioned once more.

Teasingly stalling with a poke of my cheek, I looked up to the ceiling, distracting the trio until I finally came to my choice. "I choose... neither!" I exclaimed with a surprising lunge forward, wings opened wide and a hoof stretched for each stallion of the flock. A flawless surprise attack indeed if you were a pegasi facing only three earth ponies and or pegasi. Too bad I didn’t notice the unicorn in their ranks.

With a jarring burst of light, my body halted mid-flight, held inert in a transparent frame of glowing magic that coated my body, its ends continuously shimmering through the ceiling light of the cafeteria.  "Well well well, I’m not surprised to see you trot down this path, Graze," a shallow voice echoed, cutting through the tension of the cafeteria's silenced atmosphere. Through the crowd of hushed, colorful ponies, the owner of the telekinetic spell appeared, a mighty contrast to those around his dark, greyish-blue coat.

His horn still thankfully aglow, my body floated in midair as he pulled me closer into proper chatting conditions, face-to-face. "Urhm, do I know you, creepy unicorn fellow? We were kinda doing something here, and I was sort of, you know, winning?" I stated, staring upside down, left with the blood rushing to my brain. He was somepony to remember alright—just by his presence and hushed voice alone, he was that kind of pony that'd send your blood crawling— and I didn't think that was healthy considering the fact that I was still vertically flipped.  

"Oh, don't worry, I very well know that you could take on those three buffoons... they are hardly any real challenge, but, I'd say you'd have already learnt your lesson not to fight any ponies. Well, considering the fact that it's a taboo'd curse. Well—" he paused his normal tone of speech, continuing as he progressed with a secretive whisper to my ear,"—that's what the rumors say of how you killed your mother."

My eyes dilated in shock and fear as the scenes of my previous dreaded nightmare slammed into my vulnerable mind, flooding my brain as chills, every bit as frigid as the hypothermic frostbite of last night's dreams coursed through my veins.. "H-how do you know about that? Just who are you?" I tried my best to mutter, caring not for those around me as I stared with piercing eyes through the scarlet shades of the paranormal stallion.

"I'm a Grave pony, but you can call me Grim," he smiled, firmly placing me down on my four hooves, ensuring that I did not trip over. "I know your past, Graze, and everything about you... except for that cutiemark which is more important to me than it is to you, since you plan on hiding it. So, let's have a gentlecolt's deal, shall we? You and I are going to have a little duel after our first Magic class," he glanced at the clock on the wall, "which is in five minutes. I win, you show me your cutiemark. That’s all."

As much as I'd like to not make a scene about my cutiemark, I was still curious as to what my winnings would be since it was a bet. "What do I get if I win?"

"What do you want?" the self-appointed Grave pony immediately asked.

It was indeed my first time of hearing the terminology of a "Grave pony" but yet, I was more curious of why my cutiemark was of such importance to him. With little time to think, I finally came to the conclusion that I wanted both.

"I want two things," I demanded of the unicorn. "Number one, I want to know more of you Grave ponies." He nodded in agreement with a bland 'mhmm'. "And two, I also want to know why my cutiemark is so important to you," I finished creating his side of the contract.

"Hmm, seeing as those two pertain to the same thing, I say—" he paused, reaching out his hoof towards me with a sickening smile. "—deal.”

With caution, I stared at him and his greyish-blue hoof, lending out mine with a thump as we sealed our contract.

"Agh! What the buck did you do?!" I withdrew and flailed my right foreleg in pain of a slight prick beneath my hoof. From what I'd seen, if I wasn't intoxicated, a single drop of warm blood, dead in its center, spiralled round and round the area of my hoof, sinking into its depths once the weird ritual was complete.

"It's called a blood contract, a little something that'd enforce our deal, courtesy of the Graves. See, I have one, too," he showed me his hoof, enduring the pain as that same trickle of blood spiraled and faded into his coat. "By the way, here's a tip, knowing how stubborn you pegasi can be at sometimes. It'd hurt a lot less if you just outright say it," Grim advised, trotting away at the abrupt echoing chime of the school tower's golden bell.

"I guess I'll be seeing you after Magic with Mr. Charge, yes?" he asked, followed up with a smirky chuckle. "Oh wait, you don't have a choice, I almost forgot about that."

"And neither do you," I countered, easily resting my hoof on the floor, slightly put off at the fact that I felt near to no pain from the pricked hoof. I guess it was saving it for later. "Wait, Grim! Before you leave, I'd like to know one thing."

The pony’s ears twitched at the calling of his name and reared his head at me. "It better not pertain to our bet. What is it?"

"If you know that it is against us ponies to fight, the exact reason that occurred... why risk your own?"

With a smug flare of his nostrils and a slight chuckle, he responded, "Because to me, it’s just a rumor," he answered, abruptly leaving the cafeteria with a cast of a teleportation spell, that very same dark blue glow now dissipating to reveal a vacant patch of tiles where Grim once stood.

“What could he possibly know that we don't?” Joy wondered, appearing on his respective right shoulder, leaning off its edges as his brother to his left.

“I don't know, but if it's anything that’s not us, I'd like to hear it!” I couldn't agree more with Kill's words. “Graze, you know you have to win this fight! Not have to, but you need to!”

“I know, I know, guys... and I will,” I hopefully reassured the two brotherly consciences.

"Hey, Graze! What are you waiting on, Magic is in two minutes!" Ditzy exclaimed hurriedly with saddlebags covering her back. "I don't see horns on our heads, let's go!" he flared her wings, galloping past me with a giggle. Without another thought, I followed hot on her hooves to the teacher's class of Magical Science... something I never looked forward to.

New Support Member added to your party: Ditzy (1/4)

Ditzy Friendship Level: 1

Friendship Effect: Focus- During combat, when this member is equipped to your team, you have an additional 15% chance of critical hits!

“And soon, the archives will be complete... all I have to do is win.”

Next Chapter: Chapter Three: Magic! Estimated time remaining: 1 Hour, 29 Minutes