"Let's not get ahead of ourselves. We need to get in first. We can enter the tunnel to the fortress from Equitown."

"There's a part of Bloodstone where ponies live?"

"Ponies, zebras, equines from Chineigha as well. Even though griffons aren't too big on mixing, Bloodstone is still a metropolis. I'm pretty sure there are some gargoyles and Abyssinians around here too."

"No changelings, though?"

"Well… we don't set fire to your kind on sight anymore. That counts as progress for us."


The group of twenty griffons, with three exceptions, is walking through a narrow underground tunnel with jagged sides and no support beams or anything else. Granted, having originated from a cellar of a bookstore in Equitown, the tunnel can't be too deep despite sloping down for a while before going level.

"Is it stable?" asks one of the griffons, glancing at Dust Pan who is shuffling next to Crimson. The young mare looks up at him, shrugs, slowly nods, and looks back down.

"It is," replies Three instead of her, his muzzle almost pressed against the uneven wall and examining it in agonizing detail.

"What bothers me is not knowing who built it and how they did it without anyone inside the fortress noticing," grumbles Magpie, "That bookstore owner looked hella suspicious."

"Old Monocle? Nah, he's fine for a hornhead," one of the griffons responsible for leading them to the bookstore and gaining access to its cellar speaks up, "He's lived here since I was in high school. I used to buy comic books here."

"Then how is it possible he had no idea that someone recently built a tunnel leading directly into the safest place in Bloodstone?" Magpie frowns.

"Shut it," says Crimson sharply, "You might have been gone for a long time but I know these griffons. If they trust that the unicorn doesn't know anything, I believe them."

Magpie knocks at the tunnel wall.

"I've hidden myself in bear holes against Corrupted. The walls looked similar but without the firmness. Granted, this is solid rock, but… I have no idea who could have built this, that's all. Even mine shafts are usually smoother than this and always have support beams."

"No need for those," Three shakes his head and taps the smoothly angular stones, "Back in the days of bad mom, this is how we changelings used to build tunnels even deep underground. It's far from amateur work. These sharp edges are like… boss calls it fractals, they in theory increase the surface volume infinitely and this allows the weight of the ceiling to spread throughout the entire structure, that's why the ceiling is in that weird bendy triangle shape - it spreads the load to the sides. I think Six would explain it the best, I usually just go with my drone instincts. We don't build tunnels this way home anymore, we learned to make good enough materials so that we wouldn't have to, plus smooth surfaces look neater and you can draw on them but this is how we did things in the old hive. It works."

"You can trust him on that," adds Thirteen, "Drones know their digging."

"So you're telling me that old changelings built this in the past few months in order to… what? Get inside the fortress?" ponders Magpie.

"Well, I'm no expert but changelings tend to infiltrate the power structure of any area they're trying to settle in," says Thirteen.

"Could the Irongrips be changelings or something?" asks a griffon.

"I doubt that," Magpie shakes his head, "I've travelled with a changeling infiltrator for a long time. They don't thrive in fear, they need love."

"Any kind of affection, really," Thirteen corrects him.

"Yeah, that. There's no reason why they would act like such assholes to Redtalons. They would starve themselves," continues Magpie as he shakes his head, "I'm afraid this still is a political struggle on the side of the Irongrips. Besides, no changelings would have the need to get me personally. Heh, I'm pretty sure they're like the only species on the two continents who aren't after me."

Crimson pokes Dust Pan.

"You, girl, are you a changeling?"

Dust Pan clutches her broom and pouts.

"As far as we can tell, she's not," says Thirteen, "Though you never know. Someone like my sister can hide her true nature from other changelings fairly easily," she leans close to Dust Pan's muzzle, "Are you a super powerful changeling?"

"Pfbrbrbr!" Dust Pan sticks her tongue out at her in response.

As Thirteen and Crimson quietly chuckle, the group's progress through the tunnel abruptly stops, blocked by a brick wall. There doesn't seem to be any mechanism to open it.

Magpie scowls at Dust Pan.

"What is this?"

The earth pony mare makes several motions as if pushing something sideways. A griffon in the front tries to grab any point in the wall but fails. It's smooth, almost strangely smooth for bricks and mortar.

Three approaches and taps against it. The runes on his body brighten up for a moment.

"This isn't a wall," he furrows his brows.

"It definitely felt like one," the griffon previously examining it disagrees, "and looks like one to me."

"Nope," Three shakes his head, "Wood," he taps against it with no wood noise which makes him give the strange wall a puzzled look, "Hmmm..."

So, his eyes and ears are telling him one thing but his touch and instinct disagree. Like the good drone that he is, Three goes with his hoofsies and repeats the motion Dust Pan showed them before. His hooves catch on something and the "wall" moves aside.

The inconsistency of reality makes everyone watching clutch their heads for a moment before the wall, for the lack of a better word, wibbles and reveals itself to be a cupboard currently pushed halfway away by Three.

"A physical illusion?" Magpie tilts his head, "That's not parlor magic. That's not even any above average magic."

Three shrugs and puts his hoof to his mouth.

"We should be quiet from now on."

"Yeah, smart buggo," whispers Crimson and taps the watch around her foreleg, "Pull that thing back and let's wait. We still have twenty minutes left."


"No matter what, the twenty of us can't do this alone. There's no way to shove a few thousand griffons through a narrow tunnel without notice, though. Thankfully, Silas couldn't afford to kick out all Redtalons from the GIL or he and his two hundred Irongrips would be royally screwed anyway."

"The problem is that Irongrip soldiers are still suspicious of the remaining Redtalons so if they start moving armed around the fortress outside of their schedule, they'll be in trouble."

"One of our guys is inside the fortress clock tower and has rigged the bell to ring an hour early. The shifts change at ten when the night shift switches with the afternoon one. Granted, everyone has a watch but it should give our allies an alibi to move around in full gear for a few minutes before anyone points out the inconsistency."


The bells ring for the ninth time, then for the tenth time.

The griffon guard stationed by one of the many third floor windows furrows his brows as he looks at his watch.

"Nine? Did I miss daylight savings time again?"

He looks up as he hears pawsteps approaching. The arriving griffon walks up and salutes.

"Shift change."

"Yeah, about that. Can you let me have a look at your watch? I think mine's broken."

The new guard tilts his head with a puzzled expression and raises his foreleg to the other griffon's face.

"It's ten, you heard the bells."

"Yeah, I-" the griffon's eyes bulge and blood pours out of his beak. He tries to look down but can't, due to the knife in his throat.

"And they toll for you, Irongrip scum," growls the other soldier, "Bloodstone has never fallen to an enemy and Redtalons never kneel."

As the Irongrip soldier collapses on the floor, bubbling and grunting, the Redtalon griffon opens the window, pulls out a red flare out of his pouch, breaks off the cap while waving it out of the window.

When he peeks his head outside, he grins. There are dozens of red flares burning on this side of the fortress already, with more and more lighting up.

Soon, hundreds- thousands of black silhouettes rise from the dim streets of the city and take to the sky while many more swarm the ground with murder in their eyes.

The world may have forgotten why the name Redtalon once struck fear into every griffon of the emerging Empire. Times are different now, much more peaceful and civilized even despite the darkness and growing corruption, and so are today's creatures. However, just for this one night, the heartland intruders will remember a valuable lesson - there's nothing like defeat in Redtalon dictionary, there's only victory or death.

Every male, female, or a child able to fire a gun or pick up a knife will be in the streets tonight and, after so long, it would be the Irongrip soldiers desperately looking for a place to hide.


"Three, this is where you come in."

"Reporting for duty!"

"Thirteen?"

"If we get rid of the sentries at the windows, I'm game. Otherwise it'll get a little complicated."

"There shouldn't be that many Irongrip soldiers around, actually. The vast majority are still scouring the city for me. Silas is using only the griffons he can trust so that no 'disloyal' ones are in a position to help get me out of the city."


"What's going on?" asks an overall grey griffon with silver streaks in his black beard when he hears muted noises from the outside. The royal suite has proven to have excellent sound insulation so that the ruler of Bloodstone could live his life and do his job uninterrupted by any disruptive elements.

One of the two armed griffons inside the rich suite walks from the door up to the window of the study, opens it, letting in previously nearly perfectly muted noise of chaos and screaming, and looks outside.

The light from the suite completely fails to illuminate whatever wraps around the griffon's neck, pulls him out of the window, and flings him downwards with a panicked scream. He doesn't come up again.

"Your Lordship, get down!" the remaining griffon guard aims an assault rifle at the window.

"What's the red glow all over the place?" Silas Irongrip crawls under the ornate table of the study towards the guard who tosses him a pistol. With trained precision, Silas catches it, rolls behind the guard, and stands up so that they're back to back, covering each other's blind spots.

"Looks like standard-issue GIL flares to me, Your Lordship."

"Leave out the title, Jensen, we don't have the time," growls Silas, "You're the professional here, I went through my military training before you were born. What do we do now?"

"We close the window and then perform a room by room sweep of the suite, sir! I'll do it, you cover me so that what happened to Simmons doesn't happen to me."

"Got it."

Jensen slides under the windowsill while Silas keeps a steady aim straight at it. The soldier closes the window without anything else happening. When he crawls up to Silas again and stands back up, he points to the door leading to the living room.

"I go first, you cover me, sir."

Nothing.

Unlike most places in Bloodstone, the regent's suite is well-lit and there's a rack of assorted weapons. Silas tosses the pistol back to Jensen and grabs a pump shotgun as well as a pistol of his own.

Someone knocks on the door which leads to the outside hallways of the fortress. Silas points at Jensen then to the side of the door, and then puts a talon to his beak.

"Sir," Jensen whispers, "I can't have you be the bait."

Silas ignores him, slowly heading towards the door. Jensen grits his beak, rushes to the wall next to the door, and aims at it so that anyone charging inside would immediately take a bullet.

Silas opens the door and takes a quick step back. He blinks in surprise when faced with a dark blue griffon wearing a black jacket who quickly flashes a silver badge at him before putting it back into his front pocket.

"Agent Huggs, Your Lordship. We need to escort you to the roof immediately," says the griffon, "Agent Tasheed is warming the ship up already."

"What's going on?" asks Silas, gesturing sideways at Jensen to follow before peeking outside. It doesn't pay to argue with Black Ops agents.

Agent Huggs nods downwards at the two door guards, each of them lying in a pool of blood.

"Barbarians..." he scowls, "The rebels in the city have risen up."

"How did they get in? We had the complete blueprints for the fortress. We did an ultrasonic scan-" Silas raises his shotgun as he hears the sounds of gunfire from the outside and, more importantly, echoing through the halls.

"Your Lordship, now's not the time, really. Maybe they had help from the inside, maybe you missed an access route, who knows? What's crucial is to get you to safety."

"It has to be that new Redtalon who escaped," growls Silas. Jensen clears his throat.

"Your Lordship, if they had help on the inside, that means the local GIL soldiers you didn't discharge were still untrustworthy. It's possible that only your retinue from home is still loyal. The agent is right, we need to go!"

"Right, right. Lead the way," Silas shakes his head, the gravity of the situation bearing down on him slowly but inevitably like a hydraulic press, "Damn it, Cassius has enough on his plate these days already even without Redtalon rebellion. We can't spare time and resources for a full-scale suppression operation."

"With all due respect, Your Lordship, do you have to?" asks Huggs as they rush through the street-long hallways of the fortress.

"Huggs, if the Redtalon territory successfully breaks off after everything they did during Veronica's rebellion, the other noble families might think an armed conflict of the same scale remains unpunished. Worst case scenario, we're looking at a situation where the Empire doesn't choose its rulers through diplomacy but through raw power like in its beginning. Bloodshed, millions of dead every fifty to hundred years or at any point where some families unite to take over with force. Old history of the Empire isn't peaceful in the least. We Irongrips have slowly managed to build some stability over the centuries but an event like this can break everything my ancestors worked for. The Empire has been in its current state for only three hundred years since Emhyr broke the marauder clans of the south and instilled some sense of order to those parts. They're still savages but at least they now try to maintain semblance of civilization and don't raid the neighboring states. If the Empire shatters..." he shakes his head and grits his beak, "Especially in this darkness where everyone will only try to raid relief shipments, griffons will start dying of starvation, freezing, or just madness and violence by the millions in a few weeks."

Huggs looks ahead, tears in his eyes, and whispers:

"I'm so sorry..."

"What?" Silas only manages to give him a puzzled look before the window they're passing by explodes inwards and an equine shadow pounces at Jensen through it, burying its teeth into his neck.

"Don't kill him!" orders Huggs and jumps at Silas with a flash of green light.

The regent tries in vain to struggle against something wrapped around him that's suddenly small but incredibly heavy, like a straightjacket made of stuff much denser than lead which drags him down to the floor.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry," says Three, "but we'll try to make things better for everyone, I promise."


"And what about you?"

"Crimson, I, and a few of the 'more motivated' guys will cut off the final escape route. Hopefully, Tasheed will be there and we're going to have words."

"Words like 'die, you fucking son-murdering traitor'."

"As you may have guessed, this will be somewhat… personal. For all of us."


Tasheed rushes across the landing pad on the roof as quickly as someone of his age can towards the still lowered cargo ramp of the Black Ops airship. Two GIL soldiers first aim rifles his way but quickly lower them again and wave at him to get on. There will be time to analyze the situation later but for now he must bring an accurate and eyewitness report to the Holy City. Using any form of electronic communication can't be absolutely secure over such long distance and potentially hostile territories and information like this is crucial to the security of the Empire.

"Where's the regent?" asks Tasheed as he passes the soldiers, one of whom pulls a lever which makes the ramp start rising.

"The bridge, agent."

"Casualties?" he barks, heading across the cargo area towards the front of the ship.

"The fortress has been overrun. We've managed to hold the roof for as long as we could but it looks like the entire city rose up."

"Redtalons..." Tasheed shakes his head.

"You called, history teacher?" says the last voice Tasheed expected to hear.

He looks ahead where Magpie is walking towards him from the bridge with a limp, accompanied by the supposed rebel leader Crimson and several GIL soldiers.

"I guess Black Ops courses don't teach the fact that you can't rule a place while pushing the entirety of the local population so hard they don't have other options than to fight you or die. Props to your age but I hope you weren't planning to die of natural causes," sneers Magpie, stopping four griffon lengths in front of the agent.

"I guess I haven't taught you enough to understand the importance of our work, child," Tasheed scowls, "We exist for the sole purpose of maintaining the stability of the Empire."

"The Empire is its griffons, and you were perfectly fine with letting the entire population of the third largest city in the Empire die of starvation."

"You need to understand the bigger picture-" Tasheed's eyes don't leave Magpie.

"No," Magpie interrupts him, raising his voice, "I know enough of history to understand that whenever someone spouts bullshit like 'bigger picture' or 'greater good', what they inevitably mean is to do what they say or eat dirt-" he clutches his chest as he breaks into a coughing fit.

With shocking speed for his age, Tasheed pulls out a pistol, and aims at Magpie.

The shot echoes through the cargo bay.

Tasheed drops the pistol and reaches for his bleeding shoulder with the foreleg he can still control as he steadies himself on his haunches.

Magpie isn't coughing anymore, holding a smoking pistol aimed at the agent.

"You..." Tasheed growls, starting to limp backwards.

"Me what?" Magpie chuckles, "Me can fake a cough? Me can't swing a heavy mace anymore but me still have strong enough grip to fire a gun?" he tosses the pistol to Crimson, "He's all yours."

"You're making… a huge mistake..." Tasheed growls through gritted beak.

"Yeeeah, I seem to do that a lot these days," Magpie walks over to him and kicks Tasheed's gun out of his reach, "But hey, you bastards could have just let me sit in Windy and none of this would have happened so, this one's on you."

"You are a danger-"

The second bullet goes right through Tasheed's chest. Crimson scowls.

"You killed my son. I don't need to know your reasons."

As Magpie stands over Tasheed coughing blood, the agent's eyes tear up.

"You could have saved… so many, Mag… pie. We were… so close… to having… a future. The stable Empire… we built… needs an immortal… Emperor... just… like… Equestria. Now… there's only… war left… for you… Red… talons..."

He goes limp. Crimson looks at Magpie.

"What was that all about?"

"No idea," he shrugs, "So what happens now?"

"Well, we can give Silas Irongrip to the citizens. I think they might want to have a word with him. Or maybe, you know, have him freeze in a cage for a week like he did to you, hmm?"

"I'm supposed to be in charge, right?" asks Magpie.

"Yes, although I wouldn't push it."

"Put Silas and the Irongrip soldiers who surrendered in prison, they're no use to me dead. Then rearm our GIL soldiers and have them patrol the streets, all good vantage points, and the outskirts of the city. We have a cloaked airship but the Black Ops must have dozens at least. For now, I want the fortress as secure as possible. Next, find some engineers and griffons who have worked in the power plants in the Bloodstone area. We must make sure no random agent can sabotage them. Make inventory of fuel to make sure for how long they can run. Finally, find whoever owns the assembly lines and factories in the industry districts, tell them we're taking over. Three will be in charge of repurposing the lines so that we can start manufacturing the automated farming units. In short, we need power and we need food. We have a plan and we need the right griffons. Use the loudspeaker system."

"We need to bury the dead-" Crimson speaks up.

"Later."

"Magpie?"

"Later!" he raises his voice, "Hope for the living first, dignity for the dead can wait."


Two griffons meet in a dark alley.

"It's done. The Emperor-"

"You know what happens next, right?"

"Yes, sir. It's been an honor to serve you and the Empire."

"No one can know what you did, agent, but I will personally make sure your entire bloodline is cared for as long as the Empire remains."

"We live to serve the Empire, sir."

"Indeed, we do."

A silenced gunshot is followed by one of the griffons dropping on the floor.

"I'm sorry, brother, but I know that you, of all griffons, would understand. I will finish what our ancestors couldn't."