The dead surrounded the town on all sides, clawing at the walls and crowding in on the gates, their groans echoing through the air as they laid siege to the town from every direction. They were not like Veliuona's minions, moving with their own minds and tenacious will, but rather, they were puppets: nothing but an army of husks, the pawns of some superior mastermind.
Sol wanted to blame Veliuona for this. But she knew that the blame rested with the leader of the cult... even if more and more, Sol suspected the dark goddess' hoof in these affairs. But she had no proof, and there was nothing she could say to convince Titan... and Morgan was in no shape to fight, or to even discuss the subject. She was simply in agony, trapped in bed, whimpering for the poison that had infected her veins.
Titan was gullible, and Morgan was... weak. She couldn't rely on either of them at this juncture. Titan would always give others chances they didn't deserve, and Morgan... couldn't make any decisions.
The Paladin pleaded with Sol, but Sol didn't care about his opinions, any more than she cared about the suggestions made by the Blood Seer. What she cared about was that they repelled this attack by the shambling pawns, found whatever was controlling them, and then preferably destroyed that source after extracting enough information from it to know who was the mastermind behind these orders.
She knew the walls wouldn't hold forever, and this town had no appreciable militia. All she could do was rally the ponies, get them to the largest and easiest-defended structures, and tell the families to watch out for one another while she and Titan and the Blood Seer went out to meet the ravening horde. Morgan they had no choice but to leave behind, with the Paladin looking after her, caught in the throes of agony.
The enemy was not strong, being a horde of puppeted corpses controlled by dark magic, but they were vast and many: they pressed in with weight of numbers, and there was little they could do to stop them. All the same, Titan and Sol fought onward, even with the odds against them, as they forced their foes into a bottleneck of barricades to try and give themselves the advantage.
Morgan wanted to help... but was helpless, consumed with pain, and need and desire. And her Paladin was weak, and her Paladin was afraid, and her Paladin heard her pleas and soon forgot the promises he had made to not give her the deadly stuff she needed. Instead, he stole into the room Sol had been using to research the cult and their poisons, and took from it a vial of the dragon's blood, ignoring the warnings and heedless of his own guilt as he hurried to his love's side.
Morgan drank it, deeply and greedily, and became consumed again by the fire of the dragon's blood. With it burning in her veins, she leapt up with newfound strength and vigor, but where she ran first was not to her siblings' side, but to Sol's study, to steal away more of the poison, to feed her need and hunger. Her Paladin she all but forgot in her ecstasy, as she fed upon the rest of the stolen dragon's blood, then leapt out a window, hungry for the battlefield.
She knew not what happened: Sol and Titan only saw Morgan descend in a blaze of burning glory into the ranks of the undead, cutting through the horde. She tore through their ranks, drawn onward by not the promise of glory, but the reek of the poison she so lusted for. For the cultists, too, kept themselves strong with the drink of dragon's blood, and they stank of it.
She killed them, each and every one, and so overcome with hunger she was, that the last she drank the blood of like fine wine. But when Sol and Titan found her there, she was calmly cleaning her weapons, smiling, proud of herself; unknowing that the proof of her sin was streaked across her own lips.
But Sol saw it. And Sol feared what her sister was becoming, and Sol blamed Veliuona for this atrocity, and swore that she would have her revenge.
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