The Day the Rats Went to War

by Samsara

Chapters

• Dawn Broke Like Fine Glass
• One by One and Two by Two
• The Madman is My Compass
• The Infection
• No Control This Time

Dawn Broke Like Fine Glass

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."  Perhaps an inappropriate saying regarding loss of life. For it's true that all things come from water before fire or earth.  The tradition of burying the dead, at least in Equestria, wasn't established until the Equestrian expansion into landmasses without abundant seas.  Prior to that, they modeled death after birth: Into water one shall go, after out of water one has come.  It was there, beneath the gentle waves of Death's ocean, that Twilight lay.

Submersed in dark, soft water, she rested her scarred and abused soul in her abyssal niche at the bottom of the ocean, nestled next to her deceased friends in life, surrounded on all sides by the resting souls of billions that she had never met before.  Twilight, of course, wasn't looking around and perceiving this, for her death was indeed a peaceful one (far from what she deserved, some might say), but the occasional entity would be shepherded down or up and away by an envoy from the ocean.  Unlike life, everyone had a place down there, and so many spots were empty and waiting to receive someone new.  

Twilight Sparkle's soul didn't quite look like those around her; for hers was wounded very gravely.  Large patches of skin were missing. She had no teeth, and each time a miniscule change in the water caused a current or flow, one could see the lacerations in its body, sometimes so deep that a cut in her belly reached her broken and splintered spine.  She had no hair. No color but a milky, pink skin and a blurry purple eye; her other was so damaged that she just kept it closed most of the time.  So many scars, so much pain that she had to endure, and so much death brought to the little pony that it was a wonder her spirit wasn't brought into Death's ocean floor in pieces.  Perhaps the most noticeable problem with her was the fact that she quite literally had no heart.  Her chest cavity had been torn open from the inside, and the heart plucked away like a ripe fruit to be eaten.  Few beings can rip the heart from one's very soul, others in the sea who had been tortured to death over a period of years still had theirs, but Twilight had lost everything that was ever important to her.  Death had been the only kind gesture of a hostile existence, and it was rest that she desperately needed.  But of course, a soul that has committed atrocities so terrible as hers, wouldn't simply be allowed to sit and sleep.

The soul that was once Twilight' Sparkle's opened its eyes to look around.  Sometimes it did this, and she wasn't the only soul that couldn't sleep.  There were others wandering about, though they ever spoke to one another; speech refused to travel through the water.  Twilight never left her space, though. She enjoyed it there.  Her friends were there with her, even though they all were asleep, but at least she could be with them.  Rarity wasn't present, and that always caused Twilight a great deal of grief. She just wanted to hug her friend and apologize, to see her one last time and know that she was okay.  Each of Twilight's friends' souls received a scar above their heart from their interaction with the unicorn (though each one carried their own wounds from lifetimes spent), and Twilight wanted to address each one.  Even as her own colorless, sundered body nearly fell apart in the ebb and flow of the ocean of death, she brushed the hair, kissed the wounds, and made comfortable the souls of her friends.  They were the only treasures from her world that she was allowed, and she cherished them beyond everything.  

The routine didn't take long, so Twilight found herself sitting back in her space and slowly sinking back down onto the ocean floor.  She enjoyed it there, and though her emotions and her senses were all heavily deadened, she could still feel the gentle caress of ocean life.  It is perhaps a little ironic to say that Death's ocean is a lively place, but the souls that go there all need to be tended.  Luminescent fish, with shapes beyond alien to the unicorn, would flutter in on wings and water jets, cleaning her wounds and comforting her just as she had for her friends, and they did so for every single soul out there.  Twilight relaxed, feeling the sweeping of anemones and moss massaging her body below as fish and eels and other fantastical creatures swam in and out of her shredded form, slowly placing it back together.  They never made any real progress, but Twilight always felt restored while they were present, so she welcomed them.  She would usually fall back to sleep as they worked, waking up in what felt like a century or two to an unchanged world, but this time the fish and creatures simply stopped moving after a while.

A single pulse drummed the water, sending every single fish scattering, shutting off the light from the anemones beneath, and frightening the ocean of Death down into an even more lifeless state.  Twilight felt fear for the first time since her life, and she sat up straight to try and identify the pulse.  She had never felt that pulse before, but lo and behold it came again, this time more powerful.  Twilight could hear a force tearing through the water and maliciously pursuing something, but it wasn't like any peaceful sound she had ever heard come from the celestial fish that existed beneath.  This was a far different noise.  Twilight looked up, hoping to see it coming, but the darkness consumed everything beyond fifteen feet from her face.  

The pulsing was eventually replaced by a deep, core-shaking drone; an ancient and passionless language that only the ocean seemed to understand.  The tone was so low and deep that one could almost count the time in between sound waves as the creature spoke, but its voice wasn't what was to be feared.  As it spoke, the ocean surrounding the voice tentatively came back to life, reigniting the pale blue luminescence of every single creature at the floor.  This revealed an appendage merely thirty feet or so away from Twilight, clearly moving toward her and clearly with the intent to take her.  The appendage could only have been described as a tentacle of some colossal octopus or squid, but it was far more alien than that.  The tentacle was adorned with the color of milky blood, inconsistently spread across its scaly surface, and as it approached Twilight knew what it wanted.  The ocean seemed to fear this thing; light avoided it and even Twilight found herself sitting on an empty patch of the ground with her friends having been brought a few feet away from her.  Once more she was alone, threatened by some terrible force, and cowering in the one last place that gave her comfort.  She shook her head, tried to yell "no" at the creature, but it just kept advancing toward her.  Its movements seemed to take an eternity, yet it was gaining swiftly upon her all at once, so she did the only thing she knew to do; she swam to her friends.

Twilight found herself wrapping her forelegs around Rainbow Dash's waist, burying her face in the unconscious pegasus' neck, and begging her to wake up.  She shook Rainbow Dash violently, screamed, even slapped her, but she couldn't wake the dead for any reason.  Twilight looked over her shoulder and saw the tentacle behind her, stretching out and revealing its underside to her.  She threw vision away and to another friend, diving toward Applejack as quickly as she could in the viscous water.  

"Please, AJ, please wake up.  I need you right now I need you AJ!  Please!  Please wake up!  I need help!"  Twilight found herself looking down into Applejack's peaceful face, screaming into the water and hearing only the vibrations that her futile attempts at waking the dead mare made within her body.  Applejack's hair seemed weightless in the water, and it was as if she was surrounded in a calming aura, but Twilight Sparkle's fate was left only to the ocean.  She looked back once more, knowing that she was absolutely helpless, and wanting at least to see her fate coming.  The tentacle had unfolded itself, gaining twice the area before her and offering an almost peaceful resolution.  In lieu of suckers at the bottom of this tentacle, the thing was equipped with arms.  They had four elbows each, a wrist that connected a palm with two thumbs on opposite ends of each hand, and five individual fingers with seven knuckles each.  The revolting limbs looked as if they belonged to dragons once, covered in the same milky red colored scales and armed with claws that could puncture steel.  The arms held themselves out to Twilight, clawed hands open and welcoming the unicorn's soul.

Twilight sat on her haunches, holding a submissive stance and crying freely into the water.  She was hysterical, shaking her head and weeping loudly in the presence of the envoy before her, begging it to leave her alone.  "Please don't take me!  Just let me sleep, please, I just want to sleep, please don't take me.  Please..."

The tentacle wouldn't take "no" for an answer, though, and it reached out to grab Twilight.  She struggled, of course, and swam again to her friends' sides in an attempt to summon their help once more.  Now she was yelling at the top of her lungs, though still not making any noise, and still not rousing her friends from their slumber.  Her begging became frightened gibberish, and the abomination took Twilight's body in its grip.  She felt the claws dig into her open wounds, gripping her from inside and out and pulling her away from her friends.  Her screams, if traveling through air, would have brought even the most hardened warrior to yield, but the creature dragged Twilight away from her peaceful world, and took her, flailing, into the dark abyss of the water.  She never once ceased to fight, but she found herself unable to move as the tentacle slammed her against the ocean's surface.  She could see light, and it burned her sensitive eyes and skin, and she could feel the water stretching around her, cutting off the peace of the ocean as if it were a bubble taking her away from the depths.  She screamed and fought, trying to escape the creature, trying to wrench herself out of the light, out of the heat and the pain, out of the noise and the nauseating smells, but she only found herself writhing, screaming, and thrashing about in bed.  Her eyes opened and she looked about: Silk sheets, a quilt with the entire royal history of Equestria, and a very fine oak bed frame sat in her midst, and she sat upright.  

The air was cold and filled with aromas, all of which brought Twilight to the verge of throwing up.  The light burned her eyes so much that she couldn't see for a few seconds, and the sound of hoofsteps running toward the room buffeted her ears like sledgehammers on stone.  She looked down at her hooves, seeing them back together; purple, and otherwise returned to the state they had been in before her death.  Her body was violently shaking and tears were flowing freely.  Someone threw open the bedroom door, only to see the most miserable creature in the entire world; a being whom not even death would allow to sleep.

One by One and Two by Two

"Twilight!"  A voice emanated from the doorway just a few steps away from the foot of the bed.  Twilight blinked a few times, trying to coax the tears away from her eyes, though her frantic and uncontrollable breathing refused to cooperate.  "Twilight, calm down.  It's me. You're safe."

The unicorn turned her head toward the voice, only to be greeted by a very large white blur imposing itself over the soft gradient of the entire room.  After her vision focused, however, she made out the sight of a very imposing, very stressed, very upset looking Princess Celestia.  Twilight, naturally, reeled back and tried to escape.

"Get the hell away from me!"  The purple unicorn shouted, scrambling over the sheets and using her hoof to whip a lamp from the Princess's bedside table at her.  Lying still for nearly two full days hadn't exactly done well for her aim however, so the thing just shattered on the floor in the middle of the room.

The Princess inhaled sharply in a brief expression of her annoyance with that little act, but she just gritted her teeth and sighed through them.  "Twilight, I need you to stay calm and listen to me right now.  I know you must be very confused, but I'll do my best to answer any questions you have if you'll just listen to me, okay?"

Twilight tried to keep her eyes locked with the Princess' but found herself forced to look away and shield her eyes from the bright light around her.  "Is this Canterlot?  Why am I here?"

"What do you mean?  I brought you back here after the incident at the Library."

"Tell me the truth, Celestia."  Twilight sat up and took a stance slightly more appropriate for her assertive tone of voice, and the little unicorn's refusal to use her former mentor's proper title caught the Princess off guard.  "I died. I know I died.  I remember what it's like being dead..."

"I wasn't lying to you, Twilight.  I did bring you back here...  It's not my proudest moment, but Equestria needs you.  I used the same magic that Iago taught you to bring back your life, or at least an effigy of it."

Twilight was awestruck at this gesture; not only did she not expect the Princess to be so honest, but she certainly didn't think that the tyrant of "new magic" would even have the capacity to use such ancient and profane powers.  "F-first you kill me...  the-en you bring me back?  What kind of sick..."  Twilight didn't want to let down her guard, but the anger and grief building up inside of her was too much to bear.  Twilight never wanted to hurt the Princess, and before she met Iago she never would have thought that the Princess could hurt her...  Now that Twilight and the rat were separate, though, neither her nor her memories were being manipulated.  She had a perfect recollection of the things she did, but she didn't have Iago inside her mind to filter what she felt, so she got to watch herself sadistically and brutally slaughter all of her friends, and even to remember how good it felt, but with the renewed capacity to feel remorse and empathy.  

The anger, the pain, the cold and calculated execution of dozens of ponies for absolutely no reason, and the manipulation of her friends up until their own murders just to tie up some loose ends all tore the unicorn up inside, but the last straw was her memory of just how willing she was to kill both Spike and the Princess at Iago's whim.  She felt weak, used, vulnerable, and utterly defeated, so she did the only thing she could do in such an instance: she broke down.

Celestia inched her way across her bed and tried to wrap a wing around Twilight, hoping to calm her down and keep her attention, but the weeping unicorn had retained a few habits from her time with Iago.  The instant Twilight felt the Princess' body close to hers, she flew right back into a conditioned rage.

"Get the fuck away!"  Twilight wrenched herself out of the Princess's grip and jumped out of the bed.  She wasn't very used to walking again, so she naturally fell to the floor as soon as her hooves bore weight.  This didn't stop her escape attempt, however, which only brought her to the pathetic state of crawling away.  "I'm a monster!  I'm a monster and you did this to me!"

"How dare you blame me for this!?"  Celestia immediately stood up, spread her wings, and spoke in the most intimidating voice she knew.  She desperately wanted things to go well, but the state of the world had taken its toll on her resolve, and her student had still committed treason.  "Do you have any concept of what you've done?  Do you even know why I brought you back?"

Twilight curled into a fetal position and stared in fear and anger just as a cornered animal might.  She'd never seen Celestia as angry as she was, which only added to the tension that had been situating itself between the two of them since they had locked eyes.

"You made a blood pact with Iago!  You slaughtered more than a score of ponies in Ponyville, you murdered your friends, the defenders of order in this realm, and you tried to kill me!  I loved you, Twilight Sparkle...  I loved you like my own daughter, so to see what you've done just breaks my heart in ways that you cannot even imagine.  Had you not been dead before your trial you'd have been burned at the stake for your crimes, do you understand me?"

"So what?  Did you bring me back just so that you could have me executed properly?"

"No. I brought you back because I know you, and I know you wouldn't ever have done those things if it weren't for that little...  Fucking rat.  I brought you back to prove to me that what I saw for myself and what the autopsy reports from Ponyville showed me weren't the actions of my most cherished, trusted, and beloved student alone."  Celestia's guard never fell for an instant during her entire rant, though Twilight could still see the pain in her eyes as clear as day.  

"It was me, though..."  Twilight refused to move herself from her position on the floor.  She glared up at Celestia, fighting back the well of tears growing behind her own eyes as her anger was, for the first time in months, directed back at herself.  "I made all of those decisions of my own free will...  I ignored some of Iago's advice and orders. I even fought back against him once or twice...  He showed me real power and I couldn't handle it... that's all he did."

"Twilight...  You're underestimating what he's capable of.  I've seen him trick good, upstanding ponies into doing some very dangerous and terrible things."

"No, Princess. I remember when he took my body away from me once...  He killed at least two police ponies while I was trapped away somewhere... I'll never forget that feeling.  I did what I did."

The tall, regal white pony, standing with a visage that had been a living metaphor for the strength of the very sun itself, had to force herself not to cry.  She had not suspected that Twilight's actions were entirely Iago's, but the possibility of her student having remained pure and good all throughout her confrontation was the single beacon of hope that Celestia had been wishing for.  However, as all good rulers ought to, Celestia could handle having her hopes and wishes shattered.  She had to for thousands of years.

"I suppose it's a good thing I brought you here for more than just a confession, then..."  Celestia's voice cracked during the subject change, but she managed to regain her composure before her disappointment became too much of a guiding force for her.  "Do you know exactly what Iago is?"

"I just thought he was a dragon that was too ashamed to admit he'd been beaten."

"He's not a dragon, but he's not entirely distinct from them either...  Iago is the most dangerous monster our people have ever faced, Twilight.  I'm sure he's told you things about me... some of which are true and some of which are exaggerated.  The point is that because of your actions, whether you're aware of it or not, he's back now."

"I assume you want me to take care of it?  That's why you couldn't just let me stay dead?"

"As a matter of fact, yes.  That's exactly why you're here.  You have two things now that I do not: an immunity to the plague I thought I had rid the land of two thousand years ago, and an intimate knowledge of how Iago thinks.  You spent three months with him, longer than any other pony since his birth, and diseases don't really do much to walking corpses.  Not only are you perfect for the job, but should you so choose, you'll have the chance to prove to me that you're not a cold blooded abomination like him."

"Couldn't you have taken me alive instead?"

"I was several months too late...  I assume he had you perform some rite involving your own blood, correct?"

Twilight froze and remembered the ritual with the candles.  "He asked me to slit my wrists...  How'd you know?"

"He preys on powerful unicorns. Their blood gives him the ability to use the kinds of magic that you witnessed.  The only problem is that he doesn't need their blood if he's walking around on his own, though that certainly doesn't stop him from gaining strength from it, and I've been seeing evidence of him being very much alive.  What do you think that means?"

"It means...  I resurrected him?"

"Well... yes... but there's something you're forgetting.  You can't truly resurrect someone without very great cost.  You need a sacrifice, life for life, which is why I put down that kind of magical practice a very long time ago.  You died months ago, Twilight. He just fooled you into thinking you were still alive."

"H-how is that even possible?"

"Iago is ancient and patient.  He's learned tricks that baffle even me, and he's grown so jaded and cold that I'm not even sure he knows the meaning of the word remorse anymore.  Regardless, your body died and he occupied a portion of it. The rest of it was saved as an empty vessel that he bound you to."

"How do I know you're not lying to me?  I-I-I ate... I drank...  I had sex, I felt it all!  How could I possibly have been dead!?"  This bit of information only added to Twilight's feeling of defeat.  She looked around the room, unsure of the reality of anything anymore.

"He used you, Twilight!  I told you.  Whatever he told you about me pales in comparison to the things he's done."  Celestia tried to make eye contact with Twilight, though the unicorn was staring off into the center of the room, seemingly unaware of everything that was going on around her.  "What did he tell you about me?"

"H-h-he said that you only lived this long because you refuse to have children..."

"That's true.  Once we have children we become mortal.  One can't bring life into this world without letting it go...  it's kind of a theme of nature, it seems.  What else did he tell you?"

"That you burned the Library of Ruthe...  The knowledge of eons along with anyone who worked within the entire archive."

"That's only half true.  I did have that library burned, yes, but that's because of the plague.  I saved as much literature as I could, but that wasn't very much, unfortunately.  Any book that was touched by the plague had to be burned lest it spread to the healthy.  For safety's sake we left the bodies of the staff in the library and performed their last rites from afar."

"You keep mentioning a plague, but Iago didn't say anything about that...  What's this plague?"

"In order for me to explain the plague I'll have to explain a little bit about Iago, but you'll have to trust me, I'll be saying things that sound... strange."

"Considering the circumstances I think I can give you the benefit of the doubt..."  Twilight tried to force a smile as she said this, slowly opening herself up to the princess and coming out of the fetal position.  Even though Twilight could feel the disappointment and heartbreak emanating off of the Princess, she still felt at least somewhat loved, much more so than when she was Iago's student.

"A long time ago, immortal dragons used to roam the skies of this world year round.  You couldn't look one place or another without seeing one of the beasts. It was terrifying.  They had a society all their own that ran on money and might.  That said, the weak and the foolish had no place among the dragons. A child who wasn't very big was always thrown into the forest and left to die, but as I'm sure you know, dragons are very hearty creatures.

"Dragon children left in the woods rarely actually died, and created a bit of a society of their own, unexposed to education or love, and left to their own survival in the extremely dangerous world within the Everfree Forest.  These runts, fools, weaklings, and other dragon rejects simply bred amongst themselves, eventually becoming so separate from dragons that they're now remembered as pseudodragons.  They were about as big as a pony's skull, temperamental as a sleepless Manehattanite, and usually not very intelligent.  Despite all of these familial disadvantages, one pseudodragon in particular thrived in the woods.  His name was Rylk, and he took after his dragon ancestors more than his immediate family.

"Rylk, like most dragons, was fascinated with the forces of life.  They're immortal creatures, so sooner or later they start looking into how they can create or preserve life indefinitely, though most don't get very far.  Rylk, the perverted imp that he was, loved to 'create' life in the slightly more natural sense...  He found out from a relatively early age that those of dragon blood are physically capable of breeding with almost any living creature.  He made hundreds of little bastard pseudodragon children, all of whom died from some horrendous defect or other, until he brought an abominable child into the world that I cringe to this very day just to think about.  He created the world's first magical rat.

"The first of these creatures we called the Harridan, and her children are known as the Rylkar.  She was a terrible creature, the size of a large dog with no eyes, no legs, and no tail, who gave birth from fissures and wounds all over her body, but only when she was burned by a terrible flame.  Rylk was happy to oblige her, so he sat in the woods, ever so proud of himself, burning his child until he was surrounded by grandchildren.  These grandchildren killed and ate Rylk, but the Harridan knew how to lead them.  They collected nesting material, found out how to bring fire into the world, and then propagated their own race.

"The Rylkar spread, grew, and produced more intelligent rats than the world had ever seen.  One of these rats, a natural born leader and one so intrigued by magic that he'd give anything for its pursuit, united the species under him.  I'm sure you'll recognize his stature as a large, dexterous, white rat."

"Iago..."

"Indeed.  He didn't want to be like his brethren at first however, and he came to me in order to learn.  I was happy to oblige for a time, until I realized just how twisted he really was.  Every single piece of magic that I taught him he used irresponsibly, so I kicked him out of my school.  Back then I wasn't Princess, but I did run a university for the magically inclined.  He took his own removal personally and swore vengeance against me, so he decided he'd bind the bodies of some of his deceased brothers and sisters, have them march to the center of town, and jump into the well...  Considering those creatures spent most of their time in their own filth, this spread a disease that was very lethal, very volatile, and very hard to control.  Within days a third of the city was sick, and within a week that third had died.  As far as anypony was concerned, that meant war."

"War?  But they're rats...  Aren't wars supposed to be fought by big pony knights in shining suits of full plate, gloriously battling on beautiful green fields until one side's strength and tactical intelligence outshines the others'?"

As precious as your naïveté once was, I'm afraid I have a few things left to teach you.  That's a somewhat idealistic presentation of war, Twilight.  It does nothing to explain the feelings of death that you'll be seeing from now on.

"Well of course ponies die. I died, Princess. I was never that sheltered.  I just don't see how you can go to war with a species smaller than my hoof."

"I understand that you know what death is Twilight, but until recently you've never even been inclined to kill.  You've seen a pony die by your own hoof, and from what I understand you consider yourself a monster for your actions, am I incorrect?"

"I don't suppose we can just let that little episode die along with me, can we?"

"That excuse would be a little more clever if I hadn't just brought you back up."

"Touché...  but yes. I do think I'm a monster for it...  Since you really want to know, now that I have my feelings back, the worst memory I have is hearing a colt's voice begging me to stop and I just... wouldn't."

"Twilight, here's a piece of advice I'd really appreciate it if you took.  This feeling of guilt that you have can do only one of two things; it can either ruin you, or remind you of who you are.  I suggest you not let it ruin you.  Keep that memory, though, because that's the smallest taste of war...  War is murder on a national scale, when two societies or races want the other dead and they collectively become animals to do it.  War isn't shining steel clashing against steel, it's rusty iron splitting open something's belly so that its guts, vomit, and any other fluids released by the blade mixes with the mud on the ground and seeps under your horseshoes; war isn't glorious, it's groups of foals as young as sixteen hacking each other apart, making their enemies beg for their mothers as they die screaming and crying and choking on their own blood; war is having to decide to execute prisoners: men, women and children, because you only have enough rations for your own men and you'd rather spare them the pain of starvation; war is the single worst thing that could ever happen to a civilization, and unfortunately you've already had a taste for it, so you're closest thing to a soldier I've had the displeasure of ordering around in two thousand years."

"What about the guards?"

"You've killed more ponies in the past three months than my entire guard has since you were born.  They take others alive and uphold rules and justice.  A soldier differs from a guard in that their loyalties lie only to those above them in rank, not to a doctrine or a set of beliefs.  If a leader orders soldiers to kill children, poison wells, or take royal family members prisoner for torture, interrogation, and eventual public execution, they do so.  Whether you accept it or not, you're a soldier now, Twilight; I brought you back, so you're my soldier.

"The Rylkar have returned, and Iago's found a Harridan, or made one, or something, but I've seen the plague first hand and it's exactly what I remember from my nightmares. I've seen the rats running in organized patterns, I've even begun to see common materials that the Rylkar of my day hunted for disappear from storehouses...  He's back, they're back, and this time I don't have an army to help me.  Everyone will die, Twilight.  Everyone is going to die a horrible, agonizing death unless you help us."

"What can I do?"

"Like I said, you know Iago and you're immune to the plague.  You can go into his nests and kill him, but you'll need to use this."  Celestia used her magic to levitate a small, pewter knife over from a drawer in her bedside table.  "This dagger has been enchanted to defend against the Old Magic, which makes it the very bane of dragonspawn.  It's lethal to Rylkar, and is something that I kept at my side day and night during the War of the Rats two thousand years ago.  I want you to have it, and I want you to cut off Iago's miserable little head with it."

"What if I fail?"

"You won't. You're bound by the same magic that Iago loves so much, so you can't die unless your phylactery is broken.  As it just so happens, I've got that right here."  Celestia nodded her head, showing Twilight that the inside of her golden tiara was engraved with the same runes that Twilight had spent hours memorizing in her basement laboratory.  "Unless I'm killed and this thing is destroyed, you can't be slain.  And I fully intend to keep myself and my subjects safe until the bitter end if I have to."

"I don't even know where to start...  Princess I've been dead for--"  Celestia interrupted Twilight's objections with a simple raised hoof.

"You don't have a choice, Twilight.  You did this, so you get to fix it, and you can't go back to sleep until I say so, understand?  We're at war, and I've done some pretty disgusting things already.  I brought you back from the dead, a fate that would seem a mercy to anypony who's done what you have, so damn it you are going to do as I say until I order you to die again, is that clear?"

"Princess..."

"Shut up.  When I give you a direct order, you obey it.  You are no longer a pony as far as the world is concerned. You are no longer my most promising student, and you are no longer even a subject of my merciful rule.  You are a tool; a tortured spirit whom I am giving the opportunity to take revenge on the individual who tormented it, so you will do exactly as I tell you when I tell you, and you will be grateful.  If we're going to have a problem with this I'll have you put down again and brought back without your free will.  You and I both know that I can do that."

Twilight, more than a little annoyed by Celestia's tone, wanted to come back with some kind of retort, but she couldn't.  She agreed that the Princess was right about her being a monster, and she wanted nothing more than to watch Iago's head roll, so she was more than willing to give in to her new status as supplicant.  "Alright, Princess, we won't have any problems.  I swear on my grave."  She did, however, crack a smile after that statement.

The Princess wasn't exactly amused, so she kept her tone formal and her body language firm.  Since Twilight had thrown diplomacy back in her face, she took her military training out of the vault to show her new soldier exactly what she'd be dealing with.  "The most recent reports of the plague have come from a city to the north and east of Ponyville. If I know Iago he'll skirt the forest hitting every single settlement he can until Canterlot is virtually surrounded.  He's raising an army, Twilight. Try and catch up to him."  Twilight didn't even acknowledge Celestia's words, but she did understand them.  "This is very secret.  If anypony finds out that I brought someone back from the dead to be used as a soldier in this war it'll mean my end... and now I don't have someone lined up to replace me, so I can't exactly have that happen.  Not even Luna is to know that you exist, are we clear?"

"Crystal..."

"Good. I've packed a few things that you'll need, as well as some literature on the Rylkar and on the plague from my private collection of notes.  Read it on your way, there's a chariot waiting for you on the royal balcony."

Twilight looked over toward the two glass doors that led out onto Celestia's porch.  Sure enough, two of the Princess's most trusted guards stood at the ready with a chariot.

"Princess?"

"Yes, Twilight?"

"I know you'll have trouble believing it, but...  I really am sorry.  For everything."

The final gesture had managed to touch Celestia's heart, regardless of the kind of scarring that Twilight's disposition had left on it.  "I'm sorry too...  We can't turn back time, though. You saw what happens when we try, so we'll just have to fix this the old fashioned way.  I promise you, Twilight, if you follow through with this, you will not be remembered as a butcher.  You'll be remembered as my beloved student and a tragic casualty of Iago's malice.

Twilight smiled and started to cry, but she turned her head toward the doors and stood to walk.  Celestia quickly wrapped a cloak around the unicorn and handed her a large satchel, trying to hide the tears welling up in her own eyes.

"You'll do excellently, Twilight. I just know it."

The Madman is My Compass

Twilight's chariot ride to the township to the northeast of Ponyville was remarkably long.  Ponies had expanded and settled in several places, though due to slow supply lines and a general contentedness of the population, new towns beyond what was already established very rarely sprung up and often only due to some kind of desperation.  At around the same time Ponyville was founded a few relatively unwise investors spent an awful lot of money to keep expanding into territory that "promised" rich deposits of silver in the mountains, though these never paid off.  What resulted was a collection of barely surviving towns full of ponies that were abandoned in land that was absolutely not surveyed for its ability to produce food, leading to a stagnant population and a general lack of advancement in any form.  With the exception of the mail or a four day bout of road travel, these towns were completely cut off from the rest of the Equestrian empire, making them perfect targets for anyone that had anything to gain from doing so.

Due to the ease of flight, Twilight's trip only took around six hours, but she wasted none of that time looking at the sights.  Literally every minute spent in the air was spent reading something that Celestia had left for Twilight, and it certainly did not disappoint.  Most of the books that the Princess had packed were absolutely ancient, harkening back to the time when Celestia might still have read them with curious innocence.  While most of the old tomes were dense texts full of information about the kind of magic that Iago had been performing, the one piece of literature that really held Twilight's attention was a rather overstuffed journal.  The first third or so of the pages seemed to have been torn out, while the rest were packed together tightly with annotations, scraps of paper, and about a half dozen etchings, but what was there read as follows:

June 27, Reign of Queen Dawn, Year 302,

You'd think my time with the Golden Crows would have desensitized me to death, after all I've seen the souls of hundreds leave their eyes as I held the knife bathing in their blood, but I still felt nauseous after some of the sights I was exposed to today...  The plague continues to spread throughout Canterlot and the doctors have yet to discover anything even remotely close to a cure.  The disease is so lethal that mothers have taken to cutting their foals' throats just to spare them from the suffering that it's so sure to cause them.  I fear for my life every day, knowing that even an unlucky splash from a diseased puddle could infect me, my squad, my queen, or my family, and yet each morning from daybreak until dusk I stand watch outside the castle, under orders to kill anything if it even looks at the keep in the wrong manner.  For fear of sensitive information being discovered, I've removed the first section of this text and hidden it, but in case it's the only history left alive of my people, I'll be chronicling the battle between the ponies and the Rylkar as often as I can.  I refuse to allow such vile rodents to overtake the empire that I've sworn to serve until my dying breath, and I'll be damned if that breath will be a plague ridden wheeze.  

July 14, Reign of Queen Dawn, Year 302,

From what I've been able to gather, the rats that we call Rylkar are of a completely different temperament than any that we've seen before.  This is particularly evidenced by the fact that they lack any semblance of self preservation and seem entirely driven on spreading the disease that they brought along with themselves.  It sounds ridiculous, and at first I thought it was, but then I watched for myself as a rat the size of my foreleg gnawed its own belly open and crawled, dragging its entrails across the ground over which rainwater flows before it irrigates our fields.  Hundreds of his brothers and sisters soon followed until the soil beneath was crimson and littered with tiny corpses.  Efforts to clean the infected soil proved worthless as an epidemic broke out within the city.  Even though we harvested the wheat and hay weeks later, the plague had been spread into the water and the earth itself, polluting absolutely everything that it touched.  Hundreds lay dying in the streets as I scribble this down, while I eat bread and cheese that the Queen had stored for herself and her guards.  Eating while others choose starvation over disease makes me feel like such a fat elitist, even though you can see my ribs too.

Twilight turned the page, fascinated by the journal.  Each page was woefully written, clearly in a shaking hoof that left the impression of the kind of fear that had haunted everyone in those days.  Twilight could see why Celestia had saved the journal; apart from its amazing historical significance and spectacular condition for a book its age, the tome contained a record of every single mistake that the soldiers of the past made.

July 30, Reign of Queen Dawn, Year 302,

We lost two Crows today.  The queen ordered myself and my team to go investigate a storehouse that had been abandoned to the plague.  Since there was reason to believe that the Rylkar had taken up residence in the storehouse and were already using it to multiply, we were sent in to burn it to the ground.  If anyone, and I do mean anyone, reads this; please, for the love of the sun,

DO NOT BRING FIRE TO THE RYLKAR!

Cleansing Flame seems to be the only thing that rids us of the plague, but unfortunately it appears to have actually spawned more of them.  From the reports that I've been able to read so far, there's a single Rylkar beast somewhere at the center of the storehouse, or at least the parts of it that survived the fire, but it appears to actually birth torrents of rats when it's exposed to open flame.  I trust my soldiers and their reports, so I'm afraid I'm forced to believe such a frightening display of supremacy.  The only way we can survive the disease is to burn it away, but that makes more rats.  More rats make more disease...  The more I learn about these things, the more I realize that, frankly, it's hopeless to fight.  We used to hold a day of silence any time a single Golden Crow was slain in battle.  Now we lose them so often that, if we did so, nopony would ever say a word to each other.  We just go about our lives as if everything was already over, and we do nothing to honor their sacrifice.

Twilight read through the journal during the entire trip.  Each mental image inscribed in the pages was something out of a nightmare; killing families infected with the plague and burning their homes to try and fight the spread, seeing entire neighborhoods develop the infection almost overnight, and even being privy to information about a local cemetery buying up plots of land lost to the plague just for the extra ground space.  Paranoia seemed to set in for the author and, whomever it was, started keeping entries in the journal which had the sole purpose of being a reminder of who they were even though it seemed that names were carefully avoided in the text.  

"Miss?"  Twilight's reading was interrupted by the rightmost guard pulling her chariot.  "We'll be landing soon, do you have everything together?"

"It's all here, just drop me where you need me to be."  Twilight, irritated by her interruption, only tore her eyes away from the page for long enough to respond.  Unfortunately for her, a gust of wind howled into the chariot's path and slammed her journal shut.  "Dammit!"  Just that little annoyance sparked a flare in Twilight's temper, so much so that she actually took notice of it.  With her emotions no longer regulated by Iago's presence, Twilight was extremely unstable, but the danger of that fact didn't strike Twilight quite as hard as the feeling of Iago's shackles no longer plaguing her mind.  Only her rational thinking, also freed from its prison, stopped Twilight from flying off the handle.  

The unicorn packed up her reading and decided to just finish it at a later date.  Within minutes of her putting the journal away, however, Twilight spotted a small town rising up over the horizon.  "Is that where you're taking me?"

"No, ma'am, we're taking you a mile outside of there."  Said the leftmost guard.  As if on cue, the two heavily armored pegasus stallions changed direction and rapidly descended.  The two guards covered their faces on their way through the canopy, while Twilight stared blankly ahead.  Branches, pine needles and other debris crunched against the chariot, the guards, and Twilight's stoic face.  Small wounds opened up from the punishment, but the unicorn didn't even notice most of them if they weren't within her vision.  Not a single drop of blood fell, and not a single jolt of pain bothered her.

Once the chariot reached the ground, the guards proceeded to unhitch themselves from it.  Twilight joined them at the front and the rightmost guard removed a sealed envelope from under the collar of his breastplate.  After passing along the note (and subsequently freeing his mouth up) the Guard saluted Twilight and explained her situation a little more clearly.  "This letter was written and sealed by Princess Celestia herself, don't open it until you're sure that you're alone.  Once you're done reading it, destroy it immediately and follow its instructions to the letter.  Time is absolutely of the essence, as I'm sure you know, so we'll be leaving you here.  From what I understand, you're the only one who knows how to fight whatever war we're about to get caught up in even though you don't officially exist."

"Oh, I don't exist?"  Twilight rolled her eyes indignantly as she asked the question, finding the precautions that the Princess had taken to be more annoying than helpful.

"No, ma'am.   Your name is not Twilight, I did not watch you grow and learn in the School for Gifted Unicorns from the Princess's side these past fifteen years, and I certainly didn't attend your funeral four weeks ago.  That letter should answer any questions that you have, but so long as everything goes according to plan, neither ourselves nor anyone else will ever see you again starting now.  Good luck and godspeed, you'll need them both."

Twilight turned to walk away right as both guards produced different colored clay bottles from their belts.  Each one only appeared to be able to hold an ounce of liquid, but both were promptly emptied onto the chariot.  Twilight's senses were deadened so she couldn't identify the rudimentary ingredients, but the instant both liquids came into contact with one another they ignited.  Within seconds, the chariot was engulfed in green fire that reached nearly as high as the canopy, but scorched nothing beyond the chariot itself.  The guards took off through the canopy as soon as their business was done, leaving Twilight alone in the thin woods surrounding the little settlement.  From what she could tell, the town itself wouldn't be any more than a square mile of space to cover.  

As she started the trek toward the town, she examined her letter.  The seal seemed to be a precise and intricate watermark of the sun, however when the waning light of the day struck it, it glittered with a clearly magical essence.  Twilight simply levitated it in front of her face with unicorn magic and touched her hoof to the seal, which then promptly dissolved.  The slip of paper that Twilight retrieved from the envelope had a single word written down on it, although it was in a language that Twilight hadn't ever seen before.  She attempted to pronounce the word, unsure of exactly what the Princess' game was.

"Ré...  Réalta...  Ugh...  What is this moon speak?  Réaltaghrian?"

Twilight's tongue froze as soon as she finished reciting the word, and what happened to her struck a blood curdling fear in her heart.  Twilight felt her consciousness being pulled back away from her eyes, imprisoned once more in a mental cell holding her back from her body.  Twilight fought this treachery, willing it back as best as she could, but only found herself cowering, screaming, and trying futilely to run away.  Eventually, she broke and the feeling washed over her, pulling her into someplace ethereal and still where only a single sense rang through.  It was Celestia's voice, at least that's what it felt like to Twilight.

"Oh good, you received my letter.  I'm glad I can count on my guards to deliver mail in a time of crisis."

"What have you done to me!?"  Twilight screamed, or rather tried to scream; words made no sound, but their meaning transferred perfectly.

"Relax, Twilight, you're not being shackled again.  I've given you a fraction of my True Name, which allows us to speak telepathically with each other from afar.  Unfortunately, since your bond to me is one of servitude, you won't be able to take any action while we commune in this manner.  

"Your True Name?  It's not Celestia?"

"No, and I'm not going to tell you what it is, either.  It took me a thousand years to learn half of it, and it carries the entire weight of my very being.  What I've shared with you is the word regarding my wisdom and mental faculties, hence the connection.  But I didn't bring you here to teach you about True Names, I need you to follow my directions as closely as you can, and this is the best way for me to do that.  Head into town and investigate it for signs of the plague.  Symptoms you're looking for are a high fever, delirium, amnesia, madness, and intense bleeding, both internal and external.  The plague is waterborne, not air, so its transmission can be controlled.  Just destroy any Rylkar that you find contaminating a water source."

"If what you've given me to read and what you've been telling me is accurate, these rats are pretty good strategists and could have a trap set for me.  Do you have any idea how they do that?"

"Actually I do.  Iago controls his warband of rats directly just by being in their presence.  I'm not sure how he does it, though he's always been in control like that and I suspect it to be telepathic in nature.  However, the droves of rats that Iago needs to leave behind to spread his disease are too far away to communicate with him.  Iago personally selects the strongest, fastest, and smartest of the higher species of Rylkar to train in his ways, then makes them a rudimentary officer.  When Iago's not around, the grunt rats defer to those officers.  You'll be able to identify one if you see it, believe me.  Destroy those officers and the remaining Rylkar won't be able to strategize amongst themselves, which will leave them helpless against even untrained farmers.  While you're at it, make sure that any who are infected with the plague are either killed or quarantined until they die.  They have a tendency to go mad and seek out water due to an unquenchable and unexplainable thirst caused by the plague."

"I take it there's no cure?"

"No, it's closer to a curse than a disease, however we've found that if someone's splattered with Rylkar blood or was bitten their chances of infection can be reduced by applying lemon juice to the affected areas.  It's not a perfect solution, but it might save a life or two."

"What then?"

"What do you mean?  You move on to the next town, do the same thing, and continue tracking Iago."

"But what then?  You aren't giving me a plan you're just pointing me in a direction and firing me like an arrow."

"I have a plan, and you'll listen to me when I tell you to do something.  Do not question me, you don't need to know anything more than what I decide to tell you, so go and do it."

"Don't push me, Princess.  The only way you can punish me is by keeping me alive and close to you."

"You'd better quit acting like you have all the power, Twilight, keep in mind I can still take away your free will.  Your behavior as of late has very much tempted me to do so."

Twilight knew she was beaten but didn't want to give the Princess the final word on the matter.  Most of what her mind exuded, however, was pure vitriol.  "Just provide me with enough relevant information to do my job."

"You can count on it."  Princess Celestia's words were condescendingly soft, but before Twilight had any chance to retaliate she was cast out of the void of consciousness and back into her body.  To her surprise, the unicorn found herself levitating about three feet off the ground, twisted into an uncomfortable bent backwards position with small shafts of lightning arcing between her and the surrounding fauna.  As she came back into her body, slowly returning control to each and every part, the anomalous floating lessened.

Once her hooves hit the ground, Twilight crumpled into the floor and gasped for air.  The deep breaths didn't make her feel any more comfortable (or anything at all for that matter), but they at least reinforced the idea that she could control her body.  Once she was done quivering and fighting back the feeling of tears Twilight stood and, directing her rage toward Iago and his ilk, made her way in the direction of the little back-woods town.

The Infection

For the first time in what felt like months, Twilight found the path to her goal to be a strikingly easy one.  She wasn't attacked by any beasts of the woods, hounded by crazy ponies nor otherwise bothered in any way.  This did, however, raise a few concerns in her mind.  The woods were too empty, no critters making any noise nor birds flapping about, and one would expect to see at least a few other ponies out and about.  Twilight instead got her first view of the town in the form of a farmhouse with four reasonably sized grain fields.  The fields had freshly planted grain in them that was just beginning to sprout, but nopony was out tending to or watering the seedlings.

Twilight leaned down and ran her hoof through the soil, only to find something somewhat disturbing be pulled up from under the sprouts: flesh.  It wasn't immediately recognizable as any one creature, because it wasn't just one creature; she looked out and saw the light reflect back gold and crimson as the wheat grew from out of the macabre scene of pureed bodies.  The unicorn shook her hoof to flick some of the gore off of it, and had to wipe the rest away on a soft patch of grass nearby.  It was only until she spotted a white flash out of the corner of her eye that Twilight was clued in on the nature of the blood.  What she saw was a tooth.  A sizable molar that looked eerily similar to pony molars.  Once she saw the rest of the teeth in that unfortunate soul's set scattered around, as well as many more complete sets of teeth strewn about, Twilight knew that the town could very well be lost already.  With that thought in her mind, she took off toward the house at the center of the four fields, squelching through the bloody mess that was their "irrigation."  Her cloak soaked up the crimson, letting it bloom across the fabric as it saturated the beige cloth.  She felt little drops and clumps of mud splatter up onto her body, painting her a disgusting collection of dark red, brown, and faded purple just before she shouldered down the front door.  What she saw there was something that she absolutely wasn't prepared for.

A fire roared within a gorgeous and ancient hoof-made stone fireplace.  With his front to the flames and his back to Twilight, an elderly yellow earth pony sat, staring into the hearth.  "Are you here for my children?"  He asked, his voice coming out pained and forced, as if he were struggling to form words in his head.  Twilight chocked it up to senility, but that didn't explain what had happened outside.

"No, I'm not here for your children.  But I need to know what happened to your fields.  Why is there blood in your soil?  Where's it from?"  Twilight tried to defuse the situation before it got out of hand.  She knew that something dangerous was happening, but she hadn't read anything about the Rylkar pureeing themselves into the dirt, so there was a chance that this particular issue was unrelated.  

"You see...  I've been tillin' this soil for...  Hmm, goin' on fifty seven years now.  Moved out here when I was just barely twenty, wanted to make a home for myself someplace outside of the developing cities, like all the migrating ponies of that day...  But in my almost eight decades of life, I never thought I'd outlive my children..."

"What are you talking about?"  Twilight approached the earth pony, keeping her distance but trying to circle around and get a view of what exactly he was doing.  The light from the fireplace had obscured her view, but the old stallion wasn't trying to hide anything.  He was just sitting there, stone still.

"They just started crying.  All fourteen of them.  They never stopped after they started, even the adult children.  Soon their tears turned red...  They cried much longer and much louder, and then they started shaking...  They shook themselves to death...  Shivering, hittin' their heads against the wall and floor, screaming and trying to run away from something that wasn't there..."  Twilight could hear the devastation and sadness in the old man's voice.  From the sound of it, his children had all died of the Rylkar's plague.  "They all died...  Then my wife died.  Then my neighbors died...  I thought that maybe if I planted them I could bring them all back.  If they grew in again I could just wash it all away, bring back my family..."

This whole while, Twilight had slowly moved into the old man's home.  She had circumnavigated his large throw rug that he kept in front of his fireplace, keeping a distance from his chair as she tried to look at his face.  She wished that she hadn't almost immediately.  His eyes had swollen and were bulging partially out of their sockets.  They were bloodshot, bleeding from his nose, mouth and tear ducts, and even seemed to be crimson inside his pupils, as if his eyeballs had filled themselves with blood.  He looked into Twilight's eyes, bonding his gaze with hers almost permanently, or so it felt.  "You...  You're a unicorn...  You're magic."

"Just stay where you are, sir, you're very sick."  Twilight's gut would have turned over at the thought of this pony grinding up and sowing his family and friends into his fields, but nothing would have come from the empty, dry sack that was her stomach.

The old stallion stood, showing the anger and devastation in his eyes.  He had lost his mind a very long time ago, but the plague had driven him to unpredictable, choppy movements which were almost as dangerous as a skilled fighter.  He stumbled toward Twilight, carrying a knife in his hoof that looked as if he hadn't put it down since he started his ghastly errand.  "Give me your horn!  Give me magic!  Give me back my kids!"  He dropped his jaw open and let out a weak yell, followed by a much faster and more frightening stumbling action toward Twilight.  He raised the knife, but Twilight drew hers instead, and slashed at his armed hoof with it.  The old pony's hoof separated from his foreleg and fell to the floor, followed immediately by a torrent of extremely dark and diseased blood.  The stallion fell to the floor, screaming in pain, and Twilight just stood there, dumbstruck at the outcome of her attack.  She had only planned to parry the knife, not slice his arm off.  

Yowls of pain turned into the rabid squealing of a panicking animal in its death throes.  The stallion screamed and screamed, continuing to bleed from every orifice in his body as well as his severed foreleg, and flailed wildly in a frenzy.  His foreleg continued to gush blood, splatting it about the room and into the fire, which responded by flaring up bright red.  His limbs all bashed against the floor, leaving more open wounds on the old man's body, and his neck began to twist and cock in very strange ways.  Twilight had backed up a little bit, frightened not by any kind of danger, but by how much of an animal the man had become.  By that point, though, he wasn't even an animal: he was slamming his head wildly between the wall and the floor in a vicious convulsion, leaving deep red streaks and puddles of blood at the impact sites.  After seven impacts with the ground and wall, all hard enough to feel in the floorboards, the elderly yellow earth pony let his last breath ooze out of his mouth and onto the ground, joining his family in violent demise.  

Twilight stood in the corner, frozen and staring at the corpse half in fear and half in curiosity.  The plague was far worse when seen in person than just from what she had read, and she certainly wasn't prepared to be attacked by an old man.  She did, however, eventually regain her composure and began to search the house for any stowaway rats.  After thoroughly combing the entire structure, simple as it was, Twilight opted to burn it to the ground, along with the fields, lest anybody find out about the horrors that had become of them.  In this time she had only seen evidence of disease and death, none from their source, but she still had most of a village to search before her job was done.

Beyond the simple dirt road just outside of the old stallion's farm lay a sleepy little town with quiet patrons and a general air of peace about it.  Nothing was lavish, few of the townsfolk were out and about, and even the children ran around and played basic games without the need for toys.  The scene before Twilight's cold eyes was the very picture of happiness, but she alone was cursed to see the taint bleeding into all things pure.  Two children ran past an alley that sat between the general store and some unlabeled two story building.  As Twilight watched them scamper away, she caught the scaly little tail of a rat as it disappeared behind the shadows.  The unicorn wasted no time in engaging.

The alleyway was a narrow and dark little place, designed with high walls to the north and south so that sun could only ever touch the street at sunup and sundown.  Among garbage cans and an incredible volume of trapped dust that had been blown down the streets, the alleyway was host to several different kinds of crawling vermin, but Twilight couldn't find her rat.  At this point she wasn't even sure that her target wouldn't be a field mouse, but something possessed her to move the garbage cans aside and see if the little bastard was just cowering behind it.

Nothing.

Twilight softly cursed under her breath and looked up.  Just as she was ready to leave, she spotted her target at the end of the alleyway.  The little rat wasn't as little as Twilight thought, she estimated it had to weigh at least twelve pounds judging by how tall and fat it was on its hind legs, and was standing just in the center of the alley.  It was staring her down, making obvious that Twilight was not welcome, before dropping down on all fours and scampering off into the village.

The unicorn gave chase, having to tear down the alleyway and throw herself into the daylight at the end of it.  She had lost the rat, but knew to look for the nearest source of water if she wanted to find its leaders.  Unfortunately she had no clue where that was.  She hadn't seen a well yet, and she couldn't remember spotting any rivers from their areal approach.  Twilight looked around in frustration, finding herself glancing at all the happy smiling pony faces trotting around the village.  Each time she counted a smile she counted another life that, if she didn't hurry, would end in a violent and agonizing way.  

"Excuse me."  Twilight said to a young, cream colored stallion that had just stepped near her.  Startled, the stallion turned to look at Twilight, and upon seeing her face, he screamed and ran away.  Twilight was struck by the rudeness and by just how strange it was that he would run like that.  "What in Equestria was his problem?"  Twilight asked aloud.  She received no response, however, and flagged down another pony for information.  The second target, a bright pastel orange mare with a blue mane, was much more receptive.

"How can I help you?"  She asked after Twilight confronted her.

"Where does this town get its water?  I'm an inspector from Canterlot to make sure everything's safe for you all to drink and I'm afraid I'm a little lost."  Twilight put on the best lie she could; the knowledge of an impending disease that drives grandparents to kill their families probably would just cause a panic.  

"Oh my!  Well that is important work.  We actually get our water from a really odd place, I'm not surprised you can't find it.  We used to be a mining town, y'see, and for a long time we could rely on the rain and snow pack melt from the hills.  Well, eventually we had a year or two where it just didn't rain enough and we simply went without.  The backup wells outside of town dried up, and we thought we were going to all go through a massive drought!"

Twilight realized that she had accidentally picked the kind of pony that would walk you through how to build a watch if you asked her the time, but the cloaked unicorn did nothing more than sigh under her breath.  "...And?"

"Right!  Forgot what I was talkin' about, well we had some miners up in the hills doing their jobs and they struck water of all things.  The mine wasn't very rich in anything, but it offered honest pay for honest work and, after that incident, it's been able to provide the whole town with clean water ever since."

"So the entire town gets its water solely from a single underground source uphill from you and that you're not completely sure where it comes from?"

"Well... when you put it like that it sounds kinda silly."

"That's because it is...  Dangerous, too.  Can you please point me toward this old mine?  It sounds like I really need to get to work."

"Sure, just follow the main street through town and take a left after the last house passes you.  The road winds a little bit but it'll take you straight there."  Twilight, happy to get away from the obvious chatterbox, set off down the street, kicking up dust and passing by open alleys.  More than once she heard a raspy squeak, but she wanted desperately to ignore the idea that the Rylkar were following her.  Any time she turned to spot them, nothing out of the ordinary was there to greet her back.  Eventually, though, as the houses diminished, so did the sound of rats.

The mare definitely wasn't wrong when she said that the path wound; Twilight found herself following along switchbacks the entire way up the mountain.  She kept climbing until the sun started to set, far longer than she had wanted to be out, but she had been periodically noticing signs that rats were nearby.  All along the trail, bushes and trees would shudder and shed their leaves, little rodents would skitter past pools of water near dark and dank little corners, and Twilight would spot small trails of random scraps of material leading all in the same direction: up the mountain.    

Upon reaching the end of the road, Twilight found herself face to face with a very ominous cave.  Many sconces lined the walls, but nobody had been around to load them with torches in weeks, it seemed.  The air from the cave was so thick that Twilight could smell wafts of it as the wind away from the cave changed direction; how foul it smelled was almost impossible to describe.  The air reeked of rotting flesh, putrid digestive fluids, tripe and tissue decomposing to hundreds of different species of fungi and bacteria, all of which produced a vile, wet smell of their own.  If Twilight's stomach contained anything but the dust she was buried with, it would have wound up splashed all over the mouth of the cave.  As she inhaled after her dry and fruitless retching, she detected another faint scent: burned hair.  Twilight drew her little dagger by levitating it into the corner of her field of vision and ripped a plank off of a derelict mine cart to use as a base for a torch.  She tore her cloak and wrapped the strip around the plank, igniting the thing with magic and stepping afraid into the cave without even fathoming what to expect.

For the first few hundred yards, Twilight walked with only the sound of her hoofsteps to accompany her thoughts.  Her thoughts, panicked though they were, kept her alert and focused on every little echo and every little stray noise, ready to pounce on the slightest squeak and tear it to shreds with her dagger.  The only sound that reached her ears (that wasn't invented by the veritable sensory deprivation of the cave affecting her mind) was that of dripping water deeper into the stone tunnel.  She fought her way through the incredibly tight corridors, noting water lines that indicated a once thriving spring, now were pulled back into the recesses of the mine.  She met with a barrier of stalactite and stalagmite fangs jutting from the ceiling and floor, coming together in a terrifying maw that cut her off from the sound of a brook.  Without a thought, Twilight tried to blast the teeth apart with the telekinesis that Iago had taught her, but failed miserably to even stir the air.  In Iago's absence, Twilight was starting to notice that she was incredibly weak to the energies that he had taught her to tap into.  Twilight knew that he had been manipulating her the entire time he was with her, but she had thought that she could trust the idea that at least the power was hers.  She gritted her teeth and focused all of her anger into a blast from her horn, utilizing the magic that she had spent her childhood and early adult life studying with a fervor unknown to many holy mares.  At least, Twilight presumed, the fact that she couldn't perform her old magic was a sign that Iago wasn't present.

Undeath had rendered Twilight's magical manifestations a pale and weak lavender as opposed to the brilliant violet that she used to present.  This however, did not subtract from her power: the teeth blasted apart as if hit by well placed explosives and sent shrapnel flying into the "gullet" of the beastly mountain tunnel.  Twilight felt in control again and relished the feeling, holding her knife in her hoof this time and approaching the opened tunnel carefully.  She was prepared for any ambush that her noisy entry may have sparked, but she wasn't prepared for just what she saw.

Before Twilight's eyes lay a scene of something that had once been beautiful, now corrupted by the most vile and horrid magical ichor that Twilight had ever seen.  A babbling brook springing up through a barren mountain, a miracle in a wasteland, had become a weak and retching river of viscous, crimson, swampy muck.  It poured forth from the earth, a blasphemy upon the land, vomiting its corrupted presence into the cave and poisoning even the very stone beneath it.  The smell, the sight, and the nature of the area brought Twilight to her knees.  She felt as though she'd just been dragged through the sewers beneath Manehattan, both inside and out, and no matter how desperately she wanted to throw up she simply had no ability to do so.  Her body was experiencing an incredible pain just by being there, as if her very soul were warning her of impending serious injury.  Nevertheless, Twilight stood and pushed on, climbing into the narrow tunnel through which the corruption was flowing.  She had herself angled upward, into the twisting and winding depths of this mountain's caverns, getting harder and harder to breathe, and harder still to avoid the muck flowing down part of the tunnel.  

She had to hold her dagger in her teeth, seeing that in the presence of the cave's unnatural darkness it actually seemed to light her way a bit.  She hadn't any time to think about that little boon, however, as she forced herself through the claustrophobic passage with a flowing sludge that resembled coagulated blood right next to her.  The air itself even seemed to pick up a bit of the red tinge, burning her eyes and nostrils as the vapors of that horrid sludge seeped into her sinuses.  She saw not a light at the end of a tunnel, but a pervasive blackness: a hole at the top of the hill small enough to fit through but sharp enough at the edges to skin her if she wasn't careful.  Over the edge flowed the bloody sludge, and its presence had corrupted the already sharp rocks that formed the hole in the cave wall, making a hellish looking auburn stone blade that threatened Twilight's stomach as she crawled through it.  The unicorn arched like a cat and wanted desperately to burst out through the hole and find herself on top of the mountain, looking up into into fresh air and sunlight.

Instead of a painting worthy scene of snow frosted trees and gorgeous baby deer huddling by their mother as she drinks from a thawing pond, Twilight dropped her gaze onto a Rylkar den.  After about two hours of crawling through cramped and foul-aired tunnels, forcing herself past rocky obstacles and across rivers of blood, Twilight's reward was a spherical chamber that seemed to have been gnawed from the rocks by rats' teeth.  Water dripped in from the ceiling in various places, flowing down stalactites from existing drips and all coalescing into a corrupted pool at the lowest point of the chamber.  This pool, once the origin point of the spring that had been the life blood of the town for nearly two generations, surrounded a bloated, disgusting rat about the size of a full grown bull.  The beast had sockets where it looked like eyes had been torn out and no legs, it lay and screeched in the crimson pool wallowing in its own filth and spreading its vile corruption to the water.  Somehow the crippled monster noticed Twilight enter her den and screeched an ear bursting yell.  The noise reflected off of the walls and pierced into Twilight's mind, debilitating her so badly that she didn't notice the rats surrounding her.  

They didn't wait for her, either, they pounced.  Twilight's eardrums had been destroyed from the screeching (though she could still hear due to her magical body) and she opened her eyes to a whirlwind of grimy bloody fur and scaly tails.  She felt teeth tear into her skin and, though it didn't hurt at first, every single wound that the rats dealt her burned so deeply that she could swear they had all been inflicted with red hot tools.  She screamed and tried to run, but tripped over a fat, wide-shouldered rat the size of a dog with bulging muscles, frothing mouth, and fur the color of embers buried in black ash.  This beast latched its wicked teeth onto Twilight's hind leg, prompting another scream as she felt her femur smolder and break inside her hind leg.  She wrenched herself away and blindly fired a blast from her horn, killing two or three rats around her head.  The victory was short lived, however, as more of the little beasts filled the space faster than Twilight could cast another.  At this point she lay prone, face first in sludge as she was being dragged closer and closer toward the hulking mass of flesh that gave the illusion of life.  The sludge made its way into Twilight's mouth, and it tasted just as bad as she imagined it would.  The taste itself was a mixture of raw sewage, rotten meat, and the familiar metallic flavor of fresh blood.

The large red rat held Twilight's shoulders down, pressing her nose and mouth beneath the red corrupted tar, but leaving her eyes and ears above so that she could observe her plight.  This display of intelligence disturbed Twilight almost as much as her immediate and violent defeat.  Rats continued to bite and tear at her flesh, and she could feel one burrowing partially into her side to get at something that evidently must have been the tastiest fucking thing in the world.  Twilight was crying at this point, drowning in the horrible tar oozing from the ground and the corrupting rats.  She was being turned, or killed, or infected, or something... in truth she didn't know.  The uncertainty drove her insane, the pain wracked her mind and awoke deep and dead survival instincts.  She was turning into an animal just out of fear, she could only imagine what the rats were actually doing to her.

The huge rat tilted its head toward Twilight, lashing its long, wiry tongue down into the filth beneath it and dragging along Twilight's face to get a better "look" at her.  The rats all chattered and trilled out in laughter, speaking in an organized language that seemed almost familiar to Twilight.  Her memories were frantically speeding before her vision, trying to give her any kind of scenario from past experience that might help her get out of this situation.  Uselessly, she remembered and focused on Spike rolling around in his bed and talking in his sleep.  That's when she realized, however, that the rats were speaking in an isolated dialect of Draconic.  

She wasn't fluent, but she could pick out the title "Kingmother" that the rats kept referring to her as.  She thought that sounded important, but the fact that she was being beaten and bitten and brutalized by these rats before what seemed to be their sin against nature for a queen dissuaded her from that fact.  They seemed to hold some kind of horrible grudge against her, and she was terrified what kind of humiliations these obviously intelligent monsters were preparing.  

She never lost consciousness due to her lack of a need for air, but she had not yet broken herself of the habit of breathing, so she eventually took in a lungful of the filthy muck.  It was the most awful thing that she had ever had in her body, burning through her lungs and throat and sinuses, even up to her eyes as it had oozed its way into her tear ducts.  Twilight panicked, and her panic started to bring her to a familiar series of convulsions.  The rats stopped laughing as she began to rise up off of the ground despite the big red rat's efforts to keep her down.  Lightning arced between her and the water as she left it, then between her and the rats, killing more than a few of them in the process.  The rat "queen" shrieked again and pierced Twilight's ears, driving her one step closer to absolute animal instinct, and activating some kind of primal power that Twilight's unnatural body was open to.  She saw the opportunity for escape and cast a teleportation spell from her arsenal of unicorn magic, bringing a pale purple sphere around her and moving her through time and space.  The feeling of her body straining to teleport such a distance gave Twilight the feeling that she was climbing out of her own grave.  The reactionary spell had forced her atomized form through hundreds of yards of solid rock, and she couldn't allow her will to falter for even a second during the time or she would die in an instant as her body fused with the stone of the mountain.  She wound up immediately outside of the mountain, somewhat up its slope but not directly in the foothills: she could see the town from where she landed.  

Twilight could feel creatures wriggling and writhing around on her body: rats that had been brought along with her and managed to stay latched on the entire time.  She clubbed at them with her hoof, finding her lungs and belly still full of red viscous fluid as she attempted to grunt from the exerted force.  Twilight crushed the skull of one of the rats that had found its way into her thigh, nearly chewing down to the bone in the process, and flailed at the rest of them.  Some were thrown against trees and had their spines shattered, others were simply beaten into paste by the horrified pony's reflexive overkill of battering hooves.  Twilight sat amidst nearly thirty tiny corpses, vomiting up nearly a half gallon of the red sludge from her lungs and stomach, and shivering in the most complete and pervasive terror that she had ever felt.  Twilight couldn't even count on the adrenaline to make her feel alive.

This horror only became more real as movement caught Twilight's panicked and darting eyes and brought them to focus on a single point.  The unicorn sat completely still and watched as a rat whose lower body and most of its internal organs were "left behind" in the cave, though the front portion was within Twilight's sphere when she teleported.  The bloody brown thing raised what was left of its torso up with its two front arms and crawled forward, its glassy eyes reflecting the indescribable void of all things material or emotional that is death.  To her chagrin, the rat opened its mouth to speak.

"What a competent display of your abilities.  I'm sure Celestia will be very proud of the progress you've made."  From out of the rat's mouth spewed Iago's voice, ripping at Twilight's ears like it was its own infection.  Twilight was awestruck at the conversation, knowing that this rat wasn't Iago and yet was speaking with his voice and his mind.  

"If I'd have known I would be in such polite company I'd have put on something nicer..."  She didn't, however, want him to know her intimidation of him, so she retaliated in just as sarcastic a way as he had engaged her.  "I hope you enjoy talking shit to me as much as I'm going to enjoy killing you."

"You couldn't even kill a mindless foot soldier and its crippled mother, you expect me to fear you?  Everything that you thought put you above me or in control was a lie, one that I had planned and practiced on countless ponies before you.  You think a broken Princess and the dead shell of a sacrifice are enough to stop me?"

"I know that any enemy can be defeated no matter how invincible they seem.  And I just crushed a bunch of your minions with my bare hooves, minions whom you are not too important to speak through, right?"

"I can speak, hear, see, smell, and taste through all of my race, great and small.  I envy the young one whose belly filled up with your leg, it's a shame he died before he had a chance to really enjoy it."

"Get used to that feeling, Iago.  I'm going to take a lot more away from you than that."

"I welcome you to try.  Sure you have a magical knife and a chip on your shoulder, but I taught you everything you know."

"Good, I'm glad you take me seriously."

"I said I taught you everything you know, not everything I know.  It would be best to remember that fact should you decide to prance against me.  But while you trip and fall over your own rotting hooves, fighting ironically for survival amidst a dying world that you've seen the very end of in your worst dreams, I and my kin, who have all long crawled through the filth of your lowest places, leaving our very privilege to live or die at the mercy of spiteful, hateful creatures much larger than ourselves, will rise up and devour the decorated ass that is your Queen.  It's our turn to hold our heads up high and to stomp yours into the dirt below."

Exasperated, Twilight threw a nearby stone at the reanimated half-rat, crushing it into a smear of shining red liquid and filthy brown shredded hide.  Twilight tried to catch her breath, but was deterred by the intense burning of every area that the disgusting fluid had come in contact with on her respiratory tract.  She wouldn't have had time to anyway, however, as every single one of the rats that Twilight had just killed (even the crushed and sundered ones) rose up and looked toward the unicorn.  They all spoke in unison, laughed in unison, and even swayed back and forth in unison.  From each of their tiny mouths, accented by various levels of damage, size, and tooth structure of the individuals, came Iago's voice a multitude of times over.  

"It's cute that you still want to fight, I certainly won't stop your struggles.  Just remember this: For every one of us that you see, there are ten more watching that you don't."  After the rats said this, and shared a collective, eerie laugh, they all dropped dead again and left Twilight to sit alone in the corrupted oasis that had become her patch of the forest.  Everything that the red sludge and dead rats were touching quickly withered and died, and those parts that had been exposed for a while were turning black.  She ran out until she was standing on green and collapsed just a few feet into natural forest, sobbing and clutching her wounds.  Everywhere the rats and their slime had touched her felt as though it were still on fire, even several minutes after it had left her body.

Twilight lay shivering in the dark forest floor, standing up only to approach the town in a desperate attempt to save it.  She knew that the rats would retaliate after her invasion of their home, so if she could make it back in time she might have a chance to defend at least some of the villagers.  

No Control This Time

Twilight used her light frame and utter lack of fatigue to her advantage; she bounded over rocks and roots, even kicked off of them when she could do so to gain just a little more speed.  The din of dirt clods and pebbles ricocheting through the brush helped her stay focused despite her current condition.  The unicorn's mind was in turmoil; her anxiety for the upcoming attack only grew alongside the demand for her attention to keep from tripping. Despite divided focus however, the unicorn could not shake the looming worries from her thoughts.  Every faculty in Twilight's mind was completely hung up on her utter defeat and on the rat's haunting words...

"A mindless footsoldier and its crippled mother."

Despite their downplayed descriptions on Iago's part, memories of the snapping jaws and bulging muscles of the big red rodent, "its mother" the abomination, and the almost alien intelligence and language of her vermin foes as they licked their faces and laughed sent a chill into Twilight's very bones.  Amidst the tumult of running through shady, unfamiliar territory, Twilight's fears manifested themselves vividly in her mind.  Twilight's stomach sank as her mind created a small clip of the face that had pointed her in the direction of the mountain, only bloody and torn, with the vile young of the Rylkar writhing around beneath the pony's orange tinted skin.  Before stalling completely, Twilight realized that she had lost focus and shook her head to bring herself back into reality and keep moving.  With each passing second of tormenting thoughts and memories, Twilight felt every fiber of her being quiver with fear; she knew that the rats would devour the town as retaliation for her intrusion, but she desperately –childishly– wished for it not to be.  Her mind wouldn't be at ease until she saw the place for herself, however, so she continued at full sprint toward the village.

Dust hung in the air behind Twilight as she roughly closed the distance toward town, although she personally had no idea as to where exactly she was running.  Fear of failure was one of Twilight's only remaining driving forces, the imaginary prying eyes of her mentors stuck like brands to her flanks and sent her hoofsteps into a rhythmic, coursing beat.  By the time she did reach town, even the moon wasn't enough to illuminate it from the outskirts.  Twilight skidded to a halt at the precipice of a small cliff and looked down over the northern side of town.  She was further away than she'd hoped to be, but was close enough to see the quiet, dark little buildings sitting peacefully on their foundations.  There were no lights, but that wasn't an immediate alarm to the unicorn. So she approached the streets, taking care to glance behind every stone, stump and tree she approached in order to avoid any surprises.

Her hopes for a tranquil, sleeping community were dashed against the rocks as a banshee's wail came from behind her and to the west.  The piercing shriek cut through the tense air at the base of the mountain and signaled an appalling sight.  Twilight's sprint fell back to a quick prance as her vision was stabbed by the dazzling glitter of candlelight in windows; it seemed that half the ponies in town had been awakened by the shriek, which Twilight saw as a blessing in disguise.  The soft light of ponies' torches facing toward the hills cast a long curtain of visibility out onto the landscape, and what was revealed may just as well have stayed in the darkness.  Rats by the thousands poured into the ribbon of light and beyond, uprooting shrubs and kicking away rocks.  Every parcel of the landscape that they swarmed over became a living, skittering thing with more eyes than there were stars above, each one bearing an evil fire in its depths.  Twilight didn't hesitate for an instant, instead she sprinted full force into town with the intent to stop the monsters – if at all she could.  Unfortunately the rats moved at roughly the same speed as her, keeping pace and closing in from the northwest.  Twilight moved in from the north, and when they clashed the resulting storm of creatures was more violent than anything the pegasi could concoct.  

The unicorn's hooves hit cobblestone first, but soon the frantic "clip-clop" of her gallop melted into a rhythm of wet crunches and agonized cries as thousands of rats ran nearly perpendicular to her path.  She stomped down violently with her steps, killing a few, but when she looked around to assess her progress her vision was greeted by an unbroken carpet of the things running past her, some with the crushed bodies of newly dead rats clutched in their twisted, cannibalistic jaws.  The air around Twilight exploded in a cacophony of squealing rats, falling garbage cans, splintering wood and screams by the dozens as the endless river of rodents chewed their way through the streets.  Rats hurled themselves up at Twilight, who wasn't nearly as prepared for the attack as she thought she was.  The little beasts intelligently targeted her eyes and tendons, inflicting extremely painful and debilitating wounds on the unicorn.  They were nothing like the bites she received in the cave, which she knew were intended to subdue; now they wanted her and everyone around her brought to the ground and eaten alive.  The rats were taking their vengeance out on the town, and Twilight was failing to stop them.  She screamed in frustration and heaved herself forward, the sudden force of her movements throwing a portion of the rats off of her wounded body.  

Twilight ran forward amidst the chaos and surveyed the area; she could see the beasts beginning to gnaw holes into every portion of the buildings they could reach, and not even the iron hinges and bars on reinforced doors survived.  Those teeth that could pierce solid metal did unspeakable things to flesh, and their handiwork was strewn about the moving mess that had become the streets.  All the ponies could do was run away and scream, they didn't even know what direction to flee.  Their homes were being demolished right before their very eyes, as were their families, careers, and livelihoods.  Somewhere in the distance, a mare wailed the kind of hopeless wail that could only indicate that she had witnessed her child's death, and the crackle of flame peaked to a volume far higher than any torch or bonfire could produce.  Twilight's eyes flitted toward windows and open doors, catching the light of licking flames in the alley of kindling and broken homes that surrounded her.  Everything must have been knocked from their tables and shelves in the vermin siege, candles and fuel included.  The whole town was about to start burning; buildings, food, families and all.

As Twilight barreled into the ocean of rodents, a slavering, whimpering rat the size of a dog from seemingly out of nowhere sank its teeth so firmly in her fetlock that she could feel them grinding into her bones.  Twilight's screams could actually be heard over the chaos around her; she had been able to feel their bites before, but this particular attack hurt so much worse that it was unnatural.  Twilight collapsed and was immediately blanketed by the writhing, screeching balls of teeth and filth.  The unicorn tried to shake off as many as she could, sending a few dozen of them flying, but she just couldn't resist their numbers.  The bites burned into Twilight's body, and as her opponents rent her dead flesh, jolts of agonizing pain disrupted everything she tried to do.  Her screams became those of panic, and it wasn't long before her fear manifested itself through involuntary magic.  The primal desire for the rats to be as far away as she could force them to became reality as a visible, searing hot shock wave radiated from Twilight's chest.  Rats went flying in every direction, many of them singed and smoking through their arcs in the sky.  Two buildings that were, unfortunately, within the radius of the blast inevitably suffered the same damage.  Splintered pine boards and low quality insulation fell like lethal snow on the blackened, shattered opening in the facade of the two-story ranch houses.  The rapid, violent release of energy had left Twilight in somewhat of a stupor, but she did catch the flash of ponies' manes in the firelight as the inhabitants of every home in town bolted outside.  Twilight stood up and took in the sight of her perfect, rat-free circle of churned and scorched cobblestone, all the while carnage and debris fell from the sky around her.  She took the opportunity to enact a flurry of unicorn magic that she knew she could control.  With a burst of violet tinted light, the unicorn teleported over to the ruined western home and manifested right in the center of a terrified family.  Having accidentally ended up a few feet above where she's intended, Twilight let herself fall and crush the group of rats that were readying themselves to dive toward the two horrified children.  Before their glinting, yellow teeth could pierce their eyes, Twilight's entire weight crushed them into the stone.  Just as soon as she had landed, the unicorn and the family she had just saved disappeared in a dizzying, much less graceful arcane explosion.

The five ponies flashed back into existence exactly in front of the inhabitants of the eastern home, who had run much further from their abode.  The two parents seemed to have dark blue and gray manes, though the uneven light from raging fires wasn't doing their colors any justice, and their foal was clearly very pale, almost white.  Reflexively, Twilight took a very deep breath and focused the few remaining shreds of her mental fortitude into an extremely powerful spell.  Her arcane sphere managed to envelop both families and teleport everyone to the few non-burning rooftops at the edge of town which, thankfully, weren't swarming with rats.  As was common for those that weren't used to teleportation, most of the ponies that she had saved vomited as soon as they came to rest, but Twilight wouldn't allow them any time for recuperation.

"You need to run right now!  Take your foals and get out of town, stay on the rooftops until you can't, and get to the woods!"  Twilight yelled at the two families, and to accentuate the gravity of her words, grabbed the adults' faces magically to force their attentions.  "I'm not screwing around, warn everyone whose house you pass and leave!"  Twilight nudged all four parents along the rooftops in the direction of the woods she had come from; the ones seemingly devoid of Rylkar and their corruption.  She wasn't sure if her idea would work but it was the only one she could think of

"Are...  Are you going to be okay?"  One of the mares hesitated for an instant as her family got started; a good Samaritan wanting to help her heroine.

"No, I'm not.  But you can be, so I need you to leave."  Twilight didn't even think, deciding only to tell her what she felt deep in her gut; the truth.  She looked down at her own body as she stepped toward the edge of the roof, and examined her new wounds.  They felt like they were on fire, and only the intense focus of saving lives had kept Twilight from noticing them.  The bite in her rear right hoof was so deep that she felt it could fall off at any moment, and she could even feel a small, permanent hole in her cheek where one of them had tried to gouge out her eye.  These among dozens of smaller wounds riddled Twilight's non-living body, and they didn't help mask her smell.  It was a disturbing smell that she couldn't quite put her hoof on, but the matters in front of her demanded her full attention.  She instinctively blamed it on the "bath" the Rylkar had given her and decided to move on; she could clean herself once the town had been saved, and deal with it if it persisted.

Twilight's body drowned out the feelings of pain long enough to register the cool breeze flowing through her mane and tail as she leapt from the roof.  She fell for only a quarter of a second, but to her it felt like she had taken simple a step forward; so strained were her wits that perception proved much more difficult than it should have been for her.  She did, however, manage to time a modest arcane shock wave with her fall, which radiated away and propelled a few dozen more rats through the air with lethal kinetic force.  

At once Twilight sprinted deeper into town, targeted as many groups of Rylkar spawn as she could and began her unnatural rampage.  Twilight knew that most families would be too shocked to act quickly, so she bore the guise of the enemy for the civilians' sakes.  Twilight's ghoulish appearance made this approach much simpler; she splintered their doors with bone crushing magical force and let loose a primal, agonized yell after the residents until they sprinted toward the woods.  The first family she tried this on actually scrambled out a back window to escape the horrifying visage, though the second wound up cornered in their living room until Twilight magically obliterated a wall of their house.  Regardless of responses to her, the survivors of the attack all ended up running in the same direction toward the woods, so the plan worked about as well as it could have.

Deep in her gut (a portion of which was at risk of falling out due to a rapidly splitting Rylkar bite) Twilight knew that at least (if not more than) half the town would die tonight.  The Rylkar simultaneously swept every building in town and the Ponies here most likely weren't fast enough to save themselves, but she felt she had to do everything she could.  She ran from house to house and repeated her terrifying display; it was likely that most of those ponies would fear her more than the rats, but if most of them survived she could consider it a victory.  

Twilight used her intermittent time to impale, freeze, crush, electrocute, and otherwise brutalize the beastly little rats before they could get anywhere near her.  The air was tense with ozone and fading magical residue following Twilight, as she flurried back and forth to quell a violent tide of hungry monsters.  Unfortunately for her they were not the stupid animals that they appeared, and eventually began to attack with aggressive tactics and fierce strategies, basic though they were.  Twilight managed to outmaneuver them for a while, but fatigue from her magic had been hounding her since the very beginning of the fight, and she wasn't able to keep up her stamina for long.  Twilight's wall of offensive magic weakened until a few rats managed to get through, and that new distraction brought her entire defense down.  They funneled in much more quickly as soon as the chance presented itself, and Twilight was soon overwhelmed.  Unfortunately for the rats, however, she wasn't stupid either.  As one of the monstrous vermin approached, the unicorn gracefully produced her dagger and slashed its head clean off.  The beast burst into flame as soon as its head left its shoulders and the body was rendered to ash in seconds.  Upon witnessing the incredible effect of the weapon, Twilight hastily wove together a lethal dance of magic and daggerplay; though her reach wasn't perfect she still managed to kill the stragglers off with blade and hoof.  

The unicorn couldn't help but smile during the action; the pain of her wounds, new and old, disappeared in the flourish of combat, and her mind only needed to focus on staying mobile.  The only time Twilight flinched during her dance was when another muscular, blood red rat emerged from the darkness and sank its teeth into her foreleg.  This rat was much like the huge beast in the cave, but was a little bigger and bore a scar over its right eye; its bite was just as searing.  The pain of the crunch crippled her otherwise beautiful (if not improvised) display, and it was only made worse when she realized that the rat hadn't let go.  She couldn't shake free of it and, just as she was about to sink her knife into its skull, it twisted its jaws and wrestled her to the ground.  Her head bounced off of the cobblestone street and she dropped her dagger at the loss of concentration.

The high of battle had Twilight so enraged that her actions were absolutely ruthless; the desperation tactics of a cornered animal combined with an infuriated brilliant mind.  From the ground, she gave a savage kick with her hind leg that connected to the rat's inner thigh, dislocating its hip and shattering its femur.  Just as the creature loosened its jaws to shriek in pain, Twilight grabbed its neck with her hooves and shoved it into the cobblestone.  She pulled herself onto the writhing, greasy animal and used her magic to loosen a particularly large stone from the street, while keeping it pinned with her hooves.  It snapped and chattered, clearly speaking in its unusual tongue, but Twilight didn't really care what it had to say.  The magic-enveloped cobblestone came down onto its mouth and shattered its teeth at the roots, which shut the beast up.  She picked the stone up with her hooves, having lost the finesse to hold and aim it with telekinesis, and brought it down again.  She lost herself in the rhythm, imagining the beat of a battle drum as the stone smashed into the rat's head over and over again.  Twilight only stopped when the firm "bounce" that its skull gave to the rock stopped, and nothing but mush contained in a bag of furry skin remained.

The surviving rats in the immediate area displayed a frighteningly sophisticated sense of unease at the sound of their officer's final gasping breaths, which Twilight used as the perfect opportunity to utilize powerful rush from her battle high once more.  From her horn erupted another sphere of kinetic energy that expanded so quickly that it burned away the surface of everything it swept across.  The wave vaporized the body beneath her, crushed the surrounding rats like grapes and repulsed any that were leaping for her, but the structures around the unicorn took the most damage.  Four houses immediately in Twilight's vicinity splintered completely, the stones on the street for about 60 feet around her melted as pure energy flowed through them, and the shrieking of every rat in town was halted at once in a single, deafening explosion.  Though not every single rodent was killed, that final attack broke the rats' morale and the battle was won.  The rats that survived the explosion limped back toward the mountains, and the ones far enough away from Twilight to have been unaffected stopped what they were doing and fled.  Many of the smaller rats, besides killing civilians, had been gathering hay and splinters and mulch and body parts for their nefarious needs; the explosion just sounded time for them to bring what they had home.

Twilight sat flustered amongst the corpses and the falling remains of homes and ponies' earthly possessions.  The crater that her final spell had carved into the ground was deep enough to bring her nearly eye level with the many bodies of her fellow ponies lying in the street.  She could see the pain on each one's face, and there were more than she could ever want to count.  Mares, Stallions and foals in almost equal numbers had been torn to ribbons and scattered in the commotion such that you could step on several different ponies with a single hoofprint.  Twilight pressed her hooves at the lip of the crater and hauled herself up, only to see the scene pan out before her in its grisly reality.  Not only were rats falling from the sky, but so were body parts of ponies.  The sickening splat and crunch of broken bones and shredded viscera sounded like heavy rain for several seconds as the unicorn stepped through the macabre spectacle.  She didn't know the ponies, but she saw their faces and instantly knew the final questions in each one's mind:

"What's happening?"

"Where did my foreleg go?"  

"What did I do to deserve this?"

"Why did they have to kill my foals?"

Twilight stood bewildered at the destruction that continued despite her best efforts.  She had known there would be losses, but the sight of their eyes staring at her, asking her why she didn't save them instead the others broke her will.  Everyone she saw was frozen in their final seconds of agony; stallions eyes were begging the rats to stop biting them, and those without eyes wore the wounds of having run into fires, splinters, shredded metal and snapping jaws.  She couldn't even move.  The only thought in her mind was, all this... and I let them get away.

Twilight continued walking through the marsh of bodies, both friend and foe, and let her rage build at the prospect of avenging every one of their faces, until she saw one in particular.  The corpse's final breaths were only moments ago; steam was still rising from her open wounds, and Twilight fixated on her expression almost involuntarily.  As the unicorn's eyes traced down the unknown mare's body to her opened belly, a memory from her life replayed in deepest traumatic detail; she once again witnessed Rainbow Dash's violent death at her own hooves.  The image of the bifurcated pegasus sobbing, trying to scoop her innards off of the floor and back into her body, begging Celestia's guards not to kill her despite that she couldn't be saved gnawed its way into Twilight's mind and forced her to see the parallel.  She dropped onto her knees and felt her dead, dry tear ducts squeeze whatever fluid they could out onto her cheeks.  

"No... I didn't let them get away...  I made them, didn't I?"  Twilight said aloud.  She wanted the body to answer her, to hear her misdeed affirmed so that there wasn't any question, but the dead mare stayed dead.

After a long pause and a great deal of sobbing, Twilight slowly raised her eyes from the corpse and once more looked out on the path of destruction.  The fires surrounding her, the darkness of the sky, and the deep, deep red of bloodied stone and splintered wood gave Twilight's world a hellish mien.  The blood and scorching on everything dulled it to light, and the only glint she could spot was her dagger.  It had been launched by the explosion and looked to be embedded into a post at the corner of two streets.  She focused on the point, heaved herself to standing, and dragged her sundered body toward the goal.  The shambling unicorn did her absolute best to keep from stepping on corpses or rats, but the sheer volume of the dead made this impossible.  Her wounds ached so bad she didn't know whether or not she was walking through or beside the flames around her, and she didn't know what to do about her situation anymore; the only thing that moved her was the simple goal of retrieving her weapon.  The knife had buried itself at a strange angle in the signpost, quillon first and had dislodged the piece of wood that identified the particular street.  She wrenched the dagger free and looked down for the sign, only to find its bloodstained text – Placid Street – partially buried beneath a pony's severed foreleg and another one's hewn lower body.  She picked the sign up and replaced it onto the post by hammering a sharp bit of metal into it with her hoof.  Something childlike in her came out just then, a need to fix her mistake, and a need to apologize; she used her knife to carve "I'm So Sorry" into the sign, then limped away clutching her wounds in the direction of the forest.