Nix rounded the corner of the train station and walked with guilty haste, the soles of his shoes seizing on a well-trod dirt path. He commanded his feet to follow the meandering course even as he tried to subdue the cornucopia of troublesome thoughts welling up at the base of his consciousness. To his surprise, he was successful at this latter task. To his aggravation, it was only because he was suddenly distracted by the crushing waves of fatigue that now assaulted him. He collapsed a few yards into his grand trek through what appeared to be a small park that laid on the outskirts of the village proper. He was all of fifty yards away from the back of the train station. Wheezing weakly, he assumed that this was as good a time as any to again berate his impotence in this awful reality.

’Really, Nix? Really? Those flames weren’t even hot enough to singe the brightly colored coats of all those ponies—NOW IN FULL TECHNICOLOR—and even that tiny little display left you exhausted? Jesus...err, fuck, I mean “insert exclamatory, non-traumatizing idiom here”, if something that was actually dangerous came along, you’d be fucked. Not as much as everypony else, though...

‘At least she didn’t cry.’

He willed his brain to shut its whore mouth and did his best impression of an awkward, stumbling foal as he pushed himself off the ground. He was still wavering on his feet, gasping for air, when he felt a gentle pressure on his left arm helping him balance. He looked towards the sensation and caught a yellow hoof before deep blue eyes filled his vision, twinkling with concern.

“Are you okay?!” she exclaimed as loudly as silk sliding off a tabletop.

Nix slowly pushed Flutterbob out of his field of view and held the hovering pegasus at arms length. “Don’t,” he uttered coldly.

“Oh, umm, I’m sorry. I thought you might have have been hurt, and...” her voice petered out as she landed, and became suddenly fixated with the well-landscaped lawn beneath her hooves.

“Do I look hurt?” he asked, clearly annoyed. He turned to the four other mares. Sparky, Snob, Hillbilly, and the rainbow-maned, showboating platform-slayer were all lined up a good distance from him. A bit further behind, the blue unicorn in the wizard hat eyed him warily for any signs he might toss a fireball her way. “Hey, Hillbilly. Your thing is honesty, right?" Applejack nodded in assent, confirming the jumbled memories he had gotten from Luna. “Do I appear injured?” The orange mare merely frowned at the human.

Nix turned back to the pink-maned pegasus. “I’m fine. And even if I weren’t, I wouldn’t need your help,” he spat the last word out arrogantly and began to stalk past her, deeper into the park. “I can heal myself just fine.”

“Then why haven’t you healed the hurt in your eyes?” Fluttershy’s voice could barely even register as a whisper. Nix’s gait seized.

He turned suddenly, said eyes replaced by fiery blue orbs. Licks of flame danced around his eyelids as he smiled and demurely flicked a lock of golden hair from his forehead. “Tell me more about my eyes,” he lilted huskily. The pegasus cowered at his fearful visage as he turned and began stumbling along the path again.

’Oh, that’s brilliant, let’s use even more lifeforce when we can barely stand.’

‘Brain, have I ever told you I hated you?’

‘Numerous times! Your hatred of something that actually thinks really comes as no surprise.’

‘Just shut the fuck up and fix my memories, you useless thing.’

He stumbled up to a half-occupied park bench, barely taking notice of the other occupant as he collapsed into its wooden embrace. His six brightly colored stalkers had remained where they were and appeared to be in the middle of an animated discussion, shooting furtive glances his way at random intervals. He sighed and closed his eyes, leaning back and resting his head on his two clasped hands

“You alright, there?” A mare’s cheery voice blissfully interrupted his brain’s rude attempts to inject reason into him.

“Long day,” he responded flatly, keeping his eyes closed and slouching deeper into the bench.

“Must be a short life for your kind if the day rudely decides to wear on to six-thirty in the morning,” the mystery mare next to him responded dryly. Nix breathed out a cynical, half-hearted chuckle. He leaned forward slowly and began massaging his temples.

“That fire tornado was pretty cool. For an illusion, anyway,” the mare added. Her bubbling tone seemed to have a permanent, if subtle, sarcastic tinge to it. Nix opened his eyes slightly and scrutinized his benchmate with an askance gaze. He was mildly disappointed that she was a bright aquamarine, having briefly hoped she might be a nice, macabre grey or black, or anything that suggested a physical manifestation of sardonic humor. Something that wasn’t candy coated and likely to inveigle him in the horrors of tea parties and rainbows. The brilliant white streak through her mint mane further invigorated his sudden distaste, and he frowned slightly. A single eyebrow immediately arched over one gold-rimmed eye at his negative expression.

“Damn,” he replied suddenly, dropping their mutual sideways gaze as he focused instead on the dirt path at his feet. “I was going for, ‘Oh, God, our benevolent princesses have thrown a psychotic, power-mad alien at us and we’re all gonna die unless we bow and scrape at his feet and try to avoid arousing his ire’. Guess I fucked up, huh?”

His party of pursuant ponies had seemingly come to some sort of agreement and ambled amiably towards his wooden perch, Sparky spearheading the group. Their faces all alit with hesitant smiles as they came within hearing distance of Nix and the aquamarine unicorn.

“Nah, you didn’t-” she paused, mulling over something for a second, “-you didn’t buck up. Could’ve used more lightning bolts, though. Maybe make the clouds a bit blacker. More fire tornadoes?” she offered. Nix grunted in assent, but exacted no small amount of joy at the horrified faces of his newfound babysitters, who silently witnessed the exchange from a few yards away. “Oh! And tentacles! Reminds ponies of hydras. It would really freak them out if they suddenly appeared poking through clouds.”

“Please don’t give him any more ideas-” Twilight began.

“You mean tentacles like these.” Nix’s finger-waggling would have put the most prominent jazz hands to shame.

“Uh, those’re just hands,” the unicorn deadpanned. “And they’re not even scary hands at that. Could at least have claws at the ends of ‘em, like dragons and griffins do.” Fiery talons of dark orange flame subsumed both of Nix’s forearms in an instant, and he brandished them at the mare. “Yeah! Like those!” Nix wore a satisfied grin even as the flames disappeared and his chest began to heave with noticeably greater effort.

“Performance issues?” The unicorn smiled wryly.

“Shut up, die in a fire,” the human responded with articulate grace.

“Now, now. I’m sure all those ponies at the train station were terribly frightened by your display,” she comforted.

“Whereas you’re perfectly fine with a towering twister of fire extending to the the heavens not fifty yards from where you’re slouching on a park bench?” Nix asked dubiously.

The mare studied him for a second, her eyes veiled slightly by a few stray strands of her mane’s ivory highlight. “You...really do have a lot to learn about Equestria. Better a fire tornado that lasts all of thirty seconds than the world being heaved into utter chaos for a day, or the sun not rising because a dark goddess conspires to vault the world into eternal night.” She paused, passively raising a hoof towards the human with a half-smile. “I’m Heartstrings, by the way.”

Nix flicked his gaze to the mare’s eyes—the dancing yellow flecks in her irises reminded him of a sunset in its infancy—before his eyes wandered to the mark on her flank. A golden lyre.

“Careful, champ,” she warned, a mischievous light playing in her gilded eyes. “Stare too long and a mare might get the wrong idea.”

“I’m just gonna call you Lyre,” Nix blurted out. “See, I have this thing with remembering names, and-”

“Lyra,” she interrupted, a cavalier tone in her voice. “And don’t strain a muscle as you pat yourself on the back for your creativity,” she added. “That nickname predates your mental sprain by a decade.” A genuinely warm smile replaced the seemingly ever-present ornery twist of her lips.

“I suppose that’ll have to do,” he grudgingly admitted, taking her forehoof with his hand and giving it a single shake. “Name’s Nix.” He dropped the grasp and the pair fell into silence. He was starting to feel unnerved by the confused attention of his group of handlers when Lyra suddenly spoke.

“Cat got your tongue, all of the sudden?” she asked.

“Hmm? No, I-”

His eyes glazed over as a murky memory limped to the fore of his consciousness.

The gateway to Hell was a towering black monolith, smelted from the bones of the dead and the corpses of twisted creatures whose very appearance rent the sanity of those unfortunate enough to gaze upon them. Held within this grim portal was the realm of eternal pain itself; the vile landscape stretched on infinitely, its roiling, revolting, gnarled geography pockmarked with the leprous sores of bubbling lava pools and rippling marshes of plague. Disfigured obsidian stalagmites clawed skyward with their despairing digits towards a swirling, pulsing sky of blood red smoke.

Minos hissed and angrily flicked a nearby stone at the large doors with his scaly tail. Another day, another interminable expanse of time standing guard at Hell’s gates. He hadn’t wanted this job, honestly. It was an unspoken truth among the Archons that the task was little more than banal punishment by way of rote boredom. Hell didn’t even need a gatekeeper—defiled souls seemed to just let themselves into the terrifying realm in large number, and with a gawking enthusiasm for their eternity of torture at that. He was only stuck here because he had foolishly sided with Mount Olympus two thousand years ago.

He shifted his clawed feet impatiently, the weight of his boredom slumping his shoulders as his forked tongue flicked aimlessly, desperately, at the fetid air about him. It hadn’t always been this way, this insufferably dull. However, as an Archon—he forcefully demanded his psyche accept the title granted unto him by Sammael—he would suffer any anathema forced upon him by his superiors, until some other patsy of the holy pantheon royally screwed up, took his place, and he got a promotion. He just wished the millennia weren’t so insufferably monoto-

Snikt! Snakt!

Minos cocked his head at the odd noises, drawn out of his gray meditations. He turned around to examine his charge, lifting his slitted eyes to fully examine the tall gates. Rays of a searing blue light in the form of a cross had vivisected the befouled barrier. Odder still, a slight whirring sound seemed to emanate from the other side. He placed his ear gingerly on the door shortly before it exploded inward.

Chunks of bone, eldritch abominations, and generally horrible things that had once formed the door to Hell pirouetted chaotically through the air as the airborne demon’s thoughts curiously matched his trajectory with that of his old charge’s detritus. ’I am gonna get in so much fucking trouble for this,’ he thought errantly before slamming into the ground and brutally tumbling to a stop.

Minos groaned, unable to single out any one source of pain from the symphony of anguish that played throughout his body. The demon rolled over, wheezing weakly, and ran his scaled digits over himself in sudden amazement that he was still capable of even drawing breath. The welling thoughts of relief that bubbled at the fount of his mind were rudely smashed by the several ton statue of Celine Dion that crushed his skull as it slammed into the ground—the once-doorknob to Hell’s gate slowly canted to the side before coming to rest, a tombstone hovering over Minos’s twitching, serpentine bulk.

Two blurred shadows wavered at the entrance, barely visible through the dust. As it settled, the two specters coalesced into decidedly more human shapes. One was a lanky, dark-haired man with playful green eyes. His impeccably tailored suit hung off his frame with effortless casualness; black dress pants, a simple white shirt, and a permanently unbuttoned black sports jacket that swayed lightly in the aftermath of the destruction. The other man flicked a lock of blonde hair from in front of his blue eyes. At first—and last—glance, he spurned more subtle tastes of refinery, and was garbed simply in blue jeans and a black t-shirt. Two black leather bands criss-crossed his chest, each bearing the two sheaths that peeked out from behind his shoulders. Strapped at his hips were what appeared to be two automatic pistols, one a shining chrome, the other a dull gunmetal black. The plainly garbed individual planted a single black combat boot on a particularly large chunk of debris, striking a pose. He propped the unsharpened edge of his katana on one shoulder and grinned.

“Ho Lucy! You got some ‘splainin’ to do!” the man lilted gleefully, his blue eyes flaring slightly before dying down to their customary glow.

“Phoenix.” Nix stuffed Muramasa into its sheath on his back and turned to his companion. Loki was rubbing his forehead with deliberate annoyance. The god sighed, straightened his suit jacket, and met Nix’s confused gaze with his sharp green eyes. “We’re going to have to work on your one-liners. That was terrible.” Loki ran one hand through his short brown hair. The excited murmur of distant, angry demons were a chittering annoyance, far removed from the pair for the moment.

“What? We can’t all be vaunted ‘Old Gods’ with a clever tongue and a trick up our damn sleeve for every situation.” Nix sulked. “Honestly, what would you have done? I just destroyed the gates to Hell, for fuck’s sake.”

“Yessss, and insodoing, thou hast doomed thy brethren to an eternity of demonic torment!” a bat-like demon growled as it scurried from behind him on all four of its leathery limbs, towards the open portal back to Earth. Nix drew Umbra from its holster on his hip and shot the creature in the back of its head casually, not breaking his gaze with his immortal friend. The nameless demon didn’t even twitch as its head exploded and it crumpled to the ground.

Instead of replying, Loki merely raised his index finger. He walked calmly over to the statue of Celine Dion and flicked its considerable marble mass aside effortlessly, revealing the severely malformed face of Hell’s soon-to-be ex-gatekeeper. Ignoring the rising shrieks of an increasingly infuriated demonic horde in the distance, he bent over and began addressing the shattered face of the demon.

“Hello!” he chimed warmly. What remained of Minos’s face gurgled out a non-committal response, shooting a small spray of his demonic innards through his malformed mouth as he desperately tried to expel air through his ruined features. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I am a missionary with the Church of Latter Day Saints.” Minos’s viscera-gushing death throes took on a decidedly more annoyed tone, his one intact eye rolling wildly, desperately seeking escape. “I was just wondering if you had heard the good news-” The demon’s skull immediately exploded, splattering Loki’s face with no small amount of the demon’s brain. The trickster god turned slowly towards Nix, who had nonchalantly leveled the smoking barrel of his black pistol at the smoldering crater that once housed the gatekeeper’s head. Loki glared at his blonde-haired compatriot as he wiped the entrails from his face.

“What?” Nix asked innocently, deftly plucking a pack of smokes from one of his pockets and planting a cigarette firmly in his mouth. His upturned hand immediately burst into a flaming talon, and he lit the tip with one of its burning claws. He glanced back at Loki, who inwardly wished his hateful gaze might physically harm the blue-eyed human. “I’m morally opposed to the practice of torture.”

Nix holstered his gun as the Norse god stood and summoned his own cigarette from his breast pocket. He lit it on a nearby gout of flame that spewed from the defiled soil beneath them.

“Besides, I’d need to be wearing a suit for that joke to work.”

“Phoenix-”

“Oh, we could buy bikes! Start riding them around to various dimensional pockets-”

“Phoenix-”

“-passing out pamphlets before we slaughter entire pantheons of immortals-”

“Phoenix!”

“Fine,” Nix groused. “But one of these days you’re going to regret not having a totally cool bell on your pimpin’ missionary bike.”

Loki sighed, and drew deeply on his smoke. Friend or not, he was beginning to wonder why he had agreed to tag along on the newbie’s crusade to destroy Hell.

“Cat got yer tongue?” Nix prodded. “That’s a first, for you.”

“My thoughts are just absorbed in thinking up creative ways to punish you for your utter lack of tact.”

“Obviously.”

“Although you really should buy a suit.”

“I think a trench coat is more my speed,” Nix pointed out.

“You already carry around too many weapons. A trench coat on top of that would just be...gaudy. Maybe something a bit more subtle?” Loki mulled over something for a second, before plucking a pair of sunglasses from his jacket pocket. He tossed them to Nix.

“Really? A trenchcoat is just oh-so-garish,” the human mocked, “but sunglasses, those’re okay.” He donned the dark shades in spite of his protests.

“Baby steps, Phoenix. Baby steps. You can’t become one-dimensional all at once if I’m to continue tolerating your presence. Sunglasses now, and maybe later you can traipse around in a glorified cape without triggering my gag reflex.”

“Hmph, fair enough.” The ground began to thunder under the charging feet of millions of demons as they crested a nearby rise in the landscape and hurtled towards the pair. Nix eyed the horde lazily. “So, blow ‘em up in one big fucking blast, or...?”

“Absolutely not,” his friend reprimanded. “We should conserve our energy for Lucifer. The Lord of Hell is...quite a bit beyond the foes you’re used to facing.”

Nix snorted. “It’s not like I can die, anyway.” The statement earned him a swat to the back of his head.

“I know you’re thick, but have you forgotten what will happen if you resurrect? Sammael will trace the energy from the Source to you, you’ll get the lifeforce ripped out of you, and then we’re all fucked. You die, the world dies. Try and pay more attention to your elders next time, newbie. It was bad enough when the Nazarene ignored our warnings,” the trickster god grumbled angrily. “Besides.” Loki paused, summoning a metal bo from thin air with a snap of his fingers. He ran one hand distractedly along the intricate carvings on its black surface before focusing on Nix. “Sometimes, a more personal touch is required.” He twirled the weapon in the air before leveling it horizontally behind him, smiling maniacally at the charging mass of demons before them.

Nix just shook his head and drew his two swords. “I still don’t see the point. I can finish all these guys in seconds.”

“Yes, you’d be a big hit at quite a few Eastern European bathhouses.”

“I hate you.”

Loki grinned and nudged Nix with his elbow. “Come on, Phoenix. It’ll be fun!”

Hey. Hey! HEY!

“HEY!” a purple unicorn screamed in his face. He stared dumbly at Sparky, refocusing on the world around him.

“We kinda lost you for a second there, sport,” Lyra explained.

“I lost those sunglasses in space five hundred years ago,” he said gravely to no one in particular.

“That’s, uh, interesting?” the aquamarine unicorn offered, confusion furrowing her brow. Nix’s head snapped up and turned towards the mare with a bright smile.

“In space, no one can hear you scream!” he exclaimed happily.

Lyra’s frown deepened. “Yeah, uh...that’s certainly...something.”

“Actually,” Nix lectured glibly, “it’s nothing. Utter bullshit. This one time, I was orbiting a planet, and I blew it the fuck up. Seriously, chunks of rock flinging out into dead space everywhere. I totally heard billions of screams as they were flash fried by the atmosphere when I lit it up, or when the oxygen dispersed and they started to flash freeze.” Nix paused, a finger placed thoughtfully on his chin. “It was awfully quiet after that, though.”

Lyra stared at him in shock for a moment. “I’m- uh- I’m just g-gonna go over...over there. Yeah, there. Away,” she stammered out in a rush, before hopping off the bench and walking briskly down one of the park’s many dirt paths.

“G’bye! It was nice meeting you!” Nix shouted cheerfully. The light green mare tossed a panicked glance over her shoulder at him before picking up her pace. Twilight, Fluttershy, Rarity, Rainbow Dash, Applejack, and Trixie all stared openly at him, horrified looks across their brightly colored faces.

“What are you doing?!” Twilight shouted at him, breaking the empty silence.

“Sparky! Good news! I made a friend! Her name is Lyra!” Childlike mirth seeped from his voice as his ice-blue eyes flared a bit brighter.

“Twah, what in the hay is wrong with him?” Applejack whispered to her friend. Nix had leapt off the bench and was skipping down the path towards Ponyville, his black leather trench coat billowing behind him gaily. Twilight merely turned her head slowly and stared soberly at the orange earth pony.

“Girls, we’ve...we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

Author's Notes:

Against my better judgment (read: I’m drunk), I’ve decided to submit this chapter before I complete the next one, even though they were originally one cohesive whole in my brain. In the process of writing this, though, it made more sense to end the chapter here. Nix’s flashback with Loki should make more sense after the end of next chapter, and also Obligatory Pinkie Pie Party. And maybe a fight scene. And maybe lots of things that may or may not crop up that I can’t foresee, because I’m not actually writing this story, the characters are all off doing their own thing while I just weep and rend my clothing at my utter lack of control over the narrative.

Right, I’m drunk; here, have a chapter!