Princesses of Equestria

Chapter 26: Queen Armonia's Vengeance

With a final, vindictive effort, Queen Armonia crushed Twilight's ward. The seven bodies in its soft centre writhed, screamed, succumbed to petrification, and then succumbed to gravity. Switching spells between steps, Armonia took the band of thieves in an iron telekinetic grip, then drew their spineless leader in for a royal disciplining.

"And just where do you think you're going, 'Princess' Twilight?" She jabbed at the split sphere hanging in its cyclone. "Queen Eponia's Heartstone is my birthright. My responsibility. Mine!" The beginnings of a banishing spell gathered at her horntip. "Your filthy hooves will never touch it—"

Without warning, Twilight grinned, blew a raspberry, then tore off her own head and threw it right between Armonia's eyes!

"Eugh!"

"Finders keepers, losers weepers! " Twilight's head trilled in a sing song taunt. Then, as if that weren't enough, hidden hinges clicked, and her face popped open to reveal the metallic skull of an animatronic robot. "What. A. Twist! Ha. Ha. Ha."

More clicking hinges. More mechanical laughter. Six other robots clanked their applause, heads whirring like demented drills.

"Shut up!" Armonia yelled, and blew the hideous things to scrap metal. "Who's responsible for this farce?! Show yourself!"

"Alas, poor Twilight Flopple!"

That voice. That horrible, horrible voice. Armonia went absolutely still. Deep within her steel-wrought avatar, chest scars burned, crippled wings shivered, and a horn stump seemed to snap again.

"It can't be." It was. There he floated, dressed in a prince's velvet finery, cradling the fake Twilight's metal skull as if were the last remnant of a departed friend.

"Alas!" he cried in mock grief. "I knew her well, Armenia; a filly of nonexistent jest, who most fancied alliteration. And books. So many books."

"You were vanquished," Armonia whispered, head shaking over and over. Her world reeled. The empty plaque in Canterlot garden. She'd thought its occupant was disintegrated. But he hadn't been. He was free. He was in Equinox Greens. How?

"How?" she spoke aloud, practically begging. "Celestia and Luna ... they petrified you."

"Eh. I got better." The Prince of Pandemonium shrugged, all innocence.

Got better.

A piece of a previously dismissed puzzle clicked into place. The cave where she'd ensnared Twilight's thieving band. The almighty evaporation hex which spared them. She'd been unable to identify its source through Intellectus's barrier.

At the time, she'd assumed Twilight and her friends had combined their stolen Elements and found a second wind. But they hadn't. Instead, they'd had a chaos god on their side.

He was helping them.

Terror simmered to anger. The monster who'd mutilated her was helping them. Anger exploded into berserker rage. And though his name was acidic bile in her mouth, she spewed it out anyway.

"DISCOOORD!!!"

And then she took aim at the sick, depraved, scum-sucking, pony-crippling freak, and lit him up.

Lasers. Lasers everywhere.

Queen Armonia's relentless barrage of beams dug molten trenches in the earth, incinerated trees, pulverized hills, evaporated rivers—