Princesses of Equestria

Chapter 25: Regret

Silly fillies. As if, even now, even after wielding all the power you stole here, you'd be able to resist me. Queen Armonia laughed at the sheer absurdity of it. Me, the destined ruler of Equestri—

"Aagh!" She coughed up blueish-yellow smoke, seething with embarrassment. Intellectus had found an opening of his own. Specifically, he'd found her open, laughing mouth, and fed it a bolt of stinging sphinx magic.

The swine.

Marshaling her defenses, Armonia squinted, phobomancy at the ready, searching for another opening. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She'd trained with Intellectus enough to know the wily old fossil was not to be underestimated.

No opening appeared. The hay with it, then. Armonia channeled the phobomancy into her wings, reached for wind, flapped, and made one herself.

"Riddle me this, Intellectus! What gets broken without being held?"

A lightning-wreathed cloud surged onto her former headmaster. Or rather, onto the space he'd just warped out of.

"A promise." Chains from behind, hundreds of them, tangling Armonia's wings.

"Correct." She broke the chains like cobwebs, whirled, and cut loose.

Intellectus vanished in a crimson torrent, then reappeared a hundred meters to the left, yowling. A smoking line of petrified flesh ran along his left side. Armonia twisted her lip. Age had made him slow. Sentiment had made him weak. She could use that.

"You swore we'd rebuild Equinox Greens together." Armonia loosed a second blast before she'd finished speaking. A frantically raised ward scarcely deflected it. Armonia fired again. "Why fight me, Intellectus? Are you not a sphinx of your word?" And again, and again, and again, hammering relentlessly, until his fractured barrier collapsed, revealing empty air. Which Armonia had expected. She'd already been turning to blast the space behind her.

Which Intellectus had expected.

"I made that pledge to Equus Nox. Not to Armonia!"

A concealment spell dropped from air that wasn't so empty after all. Equinox Greens' guardian, clad in hieroglyphic armor, and flying at speeds that would have made Captain Spitfire herself look twice, caught Armonia straight on the jaw.

A spray of tarry spittle and steel fragments. A blind second of confusion.

Armonia lurched, struggling to remain aloft. Her vision doubled. Tripled. Quadrupled.

Oh. Her vision was crystal clear. Intellectus had summoned the clones. A pride of twenty sphinx elementals, each armored mane to tail tuft, each clutching snakelike chains, pounced from all sides.

Armonia scoffed. He should've brought more.

"Two times correct!" The strength of twenty thousand Equestrians guided her horn scythe. A savage jolt of impact. Two sphinxes dropped away, their armor and bodies cut easily as paper. The rest dug their claws into Armonia's flanks.

"I'm not Equus Nox." A snarl past gritted teeth as she lashed to the side, hewing five more sphinxes to vaporous ribbons. "I'm stronger than her." A lunge that impaled three at once. "I'm stronger than you." Nine sets of chains bound her chest, locking her in place. She heaved, voice rising to a titanic bellow. "I'm stronger than anypony in Equestria!" Movement overhead. Straining against her bonds, Armonia looked up ...

Oh reeking, rotten rutabaga roots.

... and saw the twenty-first Intellectus, the original Intellectus, use the flail. Approximately the size of a Ponyville cottage, attached to a chain long as Armonia's own body, and every bit as solid as Equinox Greens' reinforced ward, the flail descended. Very fast. Armonia writhed, desperate to get out of the way—