Twilight hurried herself out the doors, glancing into the alleyway that sat just south of the bar: nothing.  She tried the other alleyway and again saw nothing, so she held her nose up to the air and sniffed at it like a wolf, not really knowing if anything would happen.  Oddly enough she did smell a faint twist of anxiety in the air; she couldn't explain why, but she knew exactly that that's what she could detect, the smell of lingering fear in one's heart trickling down their spine; it was delicious.  Twilight followed this scent almost as if she could see it, moving west across the street and down a few blocks, finding the alley with three homeless-looking ponies in their grotty clothes huddled in a corner; sending off the anxious smell like Rarity after buying a new bottle of perfume.  

The trio appeared to have only escaped the bar for a little quiet privacy, not being too badly affected by the violence that had just interrupted their night.  Twilight quietly slunk into the alley, blending in with the shadows as though she were an extension of them.  About halfway in, Twilight heard the telltale snort of a pony inhaling through one of his nostrils over a surface; these were definitely the guys.  

"I keep telling you all, I was an inventor!"  One of the three ponies' voices cut through the darkness and gave Twilight just a bit of pause.  "I had an airship and everything."

"Sure you did, Sad...  And I used to be governor of Canterlot's Royal Bath House."  This one, a bit more gruff in its sound than the higher pitched and somewhat squeaky sound of the first voice, chimed right in to shoot down the obvious arrogance of the first speaker.

"It's true!  And she was my fiancee!  I swear it."  

"Pfft, I've seen this picture in Playpony, she wasn't your wife."  This voice came from the third of the trio, obviously smaller and more quiet than the others, but a bit more unabashed in his direction.

"Fiancee!"

"Whatever, either way she wasn't it."

"If she was gonna marry you how come you're down in Ponyville?  Ain't you supposed to be in Canterlot or some-shit?"  Mystery-Pony-Number-Two, a.k.a. the Governor of Canterlot's Royal Bath House, asked with sarcasm in his voice.  He didn't really care.

"Trottingham!  I've told you fools that many times!"

"Doesn't answer the question."  Mystery Pony number three was just egging him on and enjoying that the clearly downtrodden Mystery-Pony-Number-One was making an ass out of himself.

"She left me and took everything.  Now all I have left is this picture..."

"Mhmm, and it's a damn good thing it's a nice flat surface."  Mystery-Pony-Number-Two said in a cold, uncaring voice, then immediately followed it with a long sniff.

Twilight had enough of the mindless drivel that the ponies were giving out, but decided to make the moment last a little bit; she stepped out of the shadows just behind the two who were goading on the one they called "Sad" and threw her forelegs over their shoulders, looking back and forth between them and happily exclaiming in an unbelievably girly voice, "Hey there, fellas."

Perhaps it was the fact that none of the three had seen or heard Twilight's approach, perhaps it was the overtly friendly voice and behavior, or perhaps it was the cocaine coursing through all three of their veins, but the two ponies that Twilight had just touched nearly jumped out of their own skin in surprise.  

"Holy fuck!  Where'd you come from?"  The orange and cream colored pony earth pony on Twilight's left (Mystery-Pony-Number-Three) yelled.

"Well I just came from the bar down the street...  Don't tell me you didn't see my show."  Twilight turned her face to meet his, grinning and exhaling to let him smell the alcohol on her breath.  

The two-tone green pegasus on Twilight's right recognized her as the one that beat the ever-loving crap out of the big orange stallion and started to reach for a hidden knife he kept under his right wing.  Twilight was too focused on the other to notice, but "Sad" kept flicking his eyes back down to him.  

"Y-y-you killed that big guy!"  Mystery-Pony-Number-Two interjected, shivering a bit from the guile that Twilight had exhibited; his past had made him very wary of ponies that could sneak up on him.

"I didn't kill him...  He was still moaning when his buds dragged him out of there, wasn't he?"  Twilight turned to meet the gaze of the pegasus, grinning at him and freezing him in his tracks.  He may as well have turned to stone with the petrifying grin of Twilight's sinister muzzle; all the color drained from his cheeks and his heart and breathing both skipped a beat.  "Sad" didn't dare to move at this point.  "So anyway...  What'cha doin' in this alley all by yourselves?"

Neither of the ponies that Twilight was draped over dared to say a thing, but "Sad" spoke up with a pompous, unabashed candor, "Cocaine.  We're doing cocaine; it's a new drug you can get derived from the plants deep in the Everfree Forest...  It makes you feel like you can accomplish anything."

"Well I appreciate your honesty..."  Twilight snarled a little and tossed her muzzle back and forth between the two ponies she was hugging on, making sure to intimidate them both for not speaking up.  "Mind if I join you?"

"Hell no!"  The cream colored earth pony shouted, obviously still extremely nervous from Twilight's intrusion.

"Yeah, this shit's expensive and we're not exactly feeling charitable right now.  If you want some, you're gonna have to put out first."  The pegasus kept his hoof on his knife as he spoke, but this time Twilight was aware of it.  The statement coaxed a snicker and poorly worded affirmation out of his earth-pony friend.

"Heh-heh-heh... yeah, gonna hafta put out."

"Come on now, mates...  Are we really going to be so uncivilized as to solicit this young lady for...  That?"  The first, shadow-hidden earth pony spoke up trying to halt the unsightly behavior of his companions.

"You don't have to, but It'd certainly be my pleasure to."  The earth pony stood up and sniffed just behind Twilight's ear; she had turned her head to meet the gaze of "Sad" but otherwise hadn't moved.

"I'll give you one chance to cut this nonsense out.  It won't turn out well for you, that I can guarantee."

"Hey, I'm a stallion of my word.  You want the coke, you bend over for us, otherwise you're S.O.L. sweetheart."  Every inch of the pegasus's body reeked of terror, but he tried his damnedest to play it off cool.

"Heheheheh, yeah, you gotta get down if you wanna get high."  That cream colored fool was getting more than just a little obnoxious.  He just followed the pegasus's stupid ideas instead of generating any of his own: a sheep among sheep.

"So you're not going to just forget that little notion, then?"  Twilight's eyes shifted to an unamused half-lidded state, glancing back and forth between the two morons and then centering on the brown and grey earth pony huddled up on the back wall of the alley; he knew not to fuck with her already, but the other two weren't so smart.

"Sure won't...  Hell, maybe we'll say you don't have a choice in the matter."  The cream colored earth pony drew a very sharp hunk of metal out from behind him, obviously having carried it around for a while, and pressed it to Twilight's throat.  He raised his opposite foreleg and tightened it around the one that Twilight had draped over his shoulders, giving him the illusion that the unicorn couldn't move.  The pegasus, on the other hand, didn't draw his own blade, but actually pulled himself away to watch from a better angle what was about to happen.

Twilight looked over to the earth pony with the shiv and smirked, reaching her hoof up and pressing on his, digging the rusty iron blade into her throat and pushing it so deep that it disappeared beneath her blackened coat.  All three ponies' faces dropped from their various emotions into the same, twisted grimace of both morbid curiosity and terror.  Twilight then grabbed the pegasus's knife with a firm telekinetic grip, throwing it upwards and slicing his wing off at the joint, coaxing a shriek of pain from him right before she swung the knife down and pinned his back leg to the fractured cobblestone ground with it.  The cream colored earth pony with a short, auburn mane had backed away in horror, pressing his back up against the wall and sitting as far away from Twilight as he possibly could; she was, unfortunately for him, blocking the only exit.  She smiled at him with a big, toothy grin, opening her teeth up and, having pulled the shiv up through her windpipe and into her mouth via telekinesis, removed the bit of metal and held it in her hoof at eye level.  "Would you look at that...  I do have a razor tongue after all."

Twilight's menacing voice was partially drowned out by the pained yelling of the pegasus, so she threw the earth pony over to him with a resounding thud and held the two of them still right next to each other.  She held up the shiv once more and placed it back into her mouth, closing her lips around it and stepping up to the bleeding pegasus, giving him a quick smile before taking his chin in her hoof and kissing him.  As she did so, she slowly pushed the shiv from her mouth into his, slicing his tongue in half and driving it into the back of his throat, pushing it past muffled screams of agony and very audible screams of terror from the earth pony sitting next to him until, eventually, the point emerged from the back of his neck.  The pegasus's eyes rolled back into his head and his twitching body fell limp, so she let it fall and land in the lap of his accomplice.  

"H-ho-holy shit!"  The original owner of the shiv was hyperventilating, unable to move from his spot due to the invisible tethers keeping him anchored to the dark alley wall and floor.  Claustrophobia was setting in around the trauma of watching his friend be killed by a femme fatale right before his eyes.  "What the hell are you?!"

Twilight didn't answer; she didn't feel the need to do so.  She simply trotted a few steps over to meet eye to eye with the quivering pony.  His eyes were continuously darting back and forth between the unicorn and the pegasus corpse in his lap; he could feel the still-warm blood trickling down his thighs and dripping onto the resonant surface below.  Twilight held her tongue out in an almost childish tease, grinning as she did so under the pale light of a half-covered moon in the shadows of seedy buildings; nothing could be more out of place than that seemingly innocent smile.  The earth pony couldn't steady himself at all, however, and continued to look on in horror.

Twilight, standing at least a foot away from his body, dragged her tongue up and down as if she were licking him, but translated across the foot or so of space was an invisible blade, slicing into his skin at the exact spots where Twilight's tongue would have been, leaving deep gouges in his flesh and tearing yell after agonized yell out of his mouth.

The morbid work that she was doing carved little symbols into him, really serving no purpose but to terrify and intimidate him and all who would ever see the body.  She cut a little too deep into his shoulder, though, because his entire foreleg eventually fell to the ground with a muffled, bony plop, prompting the artery to shoot a jet of blood nearly two feet out from him.  The cocaine and terror had both combined to raise his heart rate and blood pressure so much that every single cut in his body (and oh yes, there were hundreds) bled like cracks in a dam.  Only after three minutes of continuous slashing did he finally bleed out, taking his final gasps of breath as his carved and dripping face tilted down to stare his dead friend in the eyes.

Twilight stepped back and admired her handiwork; a butchered body missing an eye and with hundreds of little carved meaningless words all over his body, as well as a pegasus laying in his lap, coated in a mixture of blood from two sources set up to look almost like an eldritch sacrifice.  She smiled, giggled a little even, and flapped her ear as she heard the labored breathing of the one remaining earth pony off in the corner.

"I thought you'd have run by now..."  Twilight said calmly, looking over to him with her spotless black coat.  The only thing on her that had gotten bloodied were her lips from the kiss of death, and it was so even that it resembled a slightly morbid brand of lipstick.

"P-p-please don't kill me!"  The dappled earth pony clung onto the wall, his wretched state only given any kind of intrigue by his clothes.  Twilight hadn't noticed them before, but he was wearing a grimy three piece khaki suit that had been torn in many places and faded with age.  He wore the remains of a destroyed top hat with some kind of bronze device dangling a lens in front of one eye to cap off the look.  Clean him up and he could have been the Mayor of Trottingham.

"Can you give me a good enough reason not to?"  Twilight wanted to hear anything he had to say; excuses were always fun to throw back into their owners' faces.

The gray and brown earth pony paused for a second, looking down to the lump of flattened glass surrounding a picture of a hot pink mare with two-tone cotton-candy pink and magenta mane sitting on the floor.  "No...  No I can't."

Twilight perked her eyebrows, having never expected the survival instincts of any of her victims to be nil.  "Now there's an interesting answer...  Do go on."

The pony stuttered a little, but sat up straight and fixed his hat, readjusting the monocle in front of his face and then with a practiced tug, set his tie.  "Well...  I used to be an inventor...  Famous in Trottingham for my devices; they used steam to accomplish tasks that only unicorns could once do: harvest entire fields of crops in just hours, print newspapers for the entire city with only a single flip of a switch, even run cotton or wool into a single strand of cohesive yarn...  I made myself an airship too...  It could float for days and carry thousands of pounds of equipment; I was an earth pony that rivaled the pegasi.  I never liked magic, it was elitist and esoteric and always bred pompousness in the unicorns, but I eventually met one...  Her."  The earth pony tilted his nose down, directing Twilight's attention to the chipped glass paperweight on the ground.  The group had been snorting cocaine off of the flattened bottom, taking their lines off of the curvacious body of the mysterious mare in the photograph.  "I fell in love with her, took her in and even used her magic to help me create my inventions.  She was so helpful..."

"What's your name?"

"My name is Steam Saddle...  A pleasure to meet you, though I wish it were under ehm...  Better circumstances."  Steam Saddle punctuated his point by nodding toward the two corpses just feet away from them, though he was still sheepish enough to avert his eyes from the sight.

"And what was her name?"

"Zinfandel...  She tolerated me for years, all of the things that I did that irked her never made her stop loving me...  Until the cocaine.  I started doing this stuff quite some time ago...  It kept me awake, helped me invent new things, better things, more things...  But she didn't like how it made me: irritable, daft, jittery, and generally unhealthy.  She left me after I refused to quit for the fifth time...  The fifth fucking time!"  Steam's obvious sadness quickly mutated into rage.  Clearly he had a serious inclination for self-loathing after the incident.  "She stuck with me for so long and through so much, but I was too stupid...  Too blind to just look at what I was doing to myself and to her.  I deserved for her to leave me, and she deserved better than me...  I just wish I'd listened the first time...  Hell the fifth time, even...  I just wish I'd quit.  Now...  Now this shit is my life..."  Steam Saddle sat down and rubbed his nose: his nostrils were powdered with residual cocaine and had inflamed from the substance being inside.  "The only memory of her I have is this and I just got my fix by sniffing it off of her...  So really, miss, if you're going to kill me you'd be doing me a favor.  You'd be doing me, her, yourself, and the world a favor."

"I have only one question for you, Mister Steam Saddle."

Steam saddle sniffled a little and looked up, letting tears run out of his reddened grey eyes as the memories finally chipped his resolve into dust.  "Yes?"

"Do you want to die?"

"No..."

Twilight picked up the lump of glass and examined the photo of Zinfandel.  She was gorgeous, and of course showing a very slutty side of herself in that picture; ass toward the camera and a winking grin over her shoulder.  Twilight started to burn the runes into the glass, getting every single one exactly right save a single portion.  She left out the 'paragraph' that took away a pony's free will; she wanted an experiment.

"I know what you need."

"And what, pray tell, is that?"  The sarcasm in Steam Saddle's voice eeked out over his sorrow.

"Look into my eyes, I want you to tell me what you see."

"I see gold..."  Steam Saddle did as he was told, not wanting to object to the obviously far more powerful creature before him.  "Gold and...  And tranquility."

"Tranquility?"

"You're a psychopath...  No normal pony could murder two others and have such a relaxed look in their eyes...  You don't feel anything, do you?"

"No, I feel more than you could ever know, I'm just the master of my own body."

"Fascinating..."  Steam Saddle was taking the bait; perhaps it was his impaired judgment leading him on, but Twilight had him hook, line and sinker.

"No one's the master of your body...  Certainly not you with this...  Feeble little addiction."

"No...  No I'm not.  I'm a slave to my desires, and I know it."  His will was already broken down from years of isolation from his true love and a constant self destructive addiction...  Too easy, and yet still fun.

"You need a master, don't you?  Or rather a mistress...  That's what she was, wasn't she?  Your mistress?"

"Yes...  She kept me from doing the things that could have killed me, but still allowed me to be me...  I miss her so much."  He broke down and started to cry again, but Twilight yanked his chin back up and forced him to keep looking into her deep, golden eyes.

"Do you want that feeling again?"

Steam Saddle paused one more time, looking down to his photograph of a lost lover sitting inside runic glass.  "Yes...  Yes I do."

"Do you understand my power?"

"That was no ordinary unicorn magic...  No I don't understand your power..."  He was in a trance, falling pray to Twilight's venomous words and letting them lull him into dreamlike bliss.

"Good answer, you're smarter than I thought.  Perhaps I can use you, would you like that?"

"Yes...  Give me purpose."

"Do you swear yourself to me?"

"Yes..."

"Do you trust me?"

"No..."

"Good."  Twilight wasn't directly inside his head, instead just staring him in the eyes, letting him follow her suggestions for how to behave without her even needing to say them.  "I will not waste such willing participation...  So I'll give you a gift, would you like that?"

"I would.  What gift is it?"  Twilight allowed Steam Saddle to come back into a semi-lucid state so that he could be completely aware of what was about to happen.

"All I need is for you to submit entirely to me, can you do that?"  She wanted him to make the choice willingly only for the satisfaction of having her power recognized enough to receive a gift of someone's life; there was otherwise no actual need for him to do so: she could have it either way.

"I can...  You have my being in its entirety."  The time Steam Saddle spent staring into Twilight's eyes had sobered him up, and by then he was feeling more alive than he had in decades.  Everything was coming into perspective, and his salvation was in the sublimity of Twilight's dark heart.

"Good."  Twilight smiled and brought the glass lump down below his chest, walking forward and coaxing him to stand up against the wall.  "Hold still," she said, slowly drawing an atom-thin telekinetic blade from her hoof.  He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, letting out a surprised yelp as she drove the thing into the space just above his heart.  Twilight pulled it back slowly, letting his pierced aorta push blood out of his body in torrents, soaking the lump of glass and setting solid into the individual runes.  She twisted the blade and shredded his heart, ending his life instantly and catching his body in a kind of macabre hug before he hit the floor.  The glow from the runes had shifted from the familiar faint purple in earlier uses of the magic to a very dark crimson, bringing him back into the world, with his full free will intact.  

He opened his eyes, face absolutely pale from the blood loss, and took in his surroundings.  He didn't quite remember what had happened right away, but realized that he was hugging Twilight in an alley and slowly started to recollect his position; up to and including the stab in the heart.  "What did you do?"

"I've brought you back from death, and now your only purpose is to serve me.  Your life is mine, literally, and you'll live as long as I wish for you to."

"H-how?"

"It's magic, my magic.  I don't have to explain it to you and I shan't."  Twilight pulled back and looked the earth pony in the eyes; he was considerably more attractive without that filthy aura of life around him, but he was still so far beneath Twilight in her mind that she looked at him more as a domesticated animal than anything else.  "Just understand that if I break this little lump, it's down into the cold embrace of death you go, got it?"

"I understand...  What will you have me do?"

"You can do as you wish for now, but I'll call to you someday, and when you hear my beckoning then you will come to me.  Alcohol and drugs won't affect you, so I suggest you get back to doing what you really loved, otherwise you can feel free to sit here and rot for all I care, just realize the value of this gift: you'll never die or grow old, and you don't need to eat, sleep, drink, or even breathe to feel tip top shape as you do right now."

"What should I call you?"

"You shouldn't call me, I'll call you."

Steam Saddle was just a little irritated by that response, but knew better than to talk back already.  "Understood."

Twilight ended the conversation with a bow, turning to leave the alley as well as that filthy piece of Ponyville behind.  The rest of her army would grow with both willing and unwilling participants as the days stretched on, this she knew, but she needed to release Trixie and indoctrinate her as well; she just wasn't sure if she wanted it to be willing or unwilling yet.

[Steam Saddle OC provided with permission and by request from RetroGamer1224!]