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.