Fanfic / Besides the Will of Evil

An ancient evil has awakened. No, really, it has. From the depths of time, a black, noxious threat has risen up after millennia of imprisonment. It washes like oil over Equestria, swallowing up towns and uncovering terrible secrets long buried. Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy and Rarity are prepared to combat this great darkness. However, to do so, they must uncover the truths about the Elements of Harmony, and the truths about the ancient forerunners of Equestrian culture. What they find will challenge their conceptions of their own places in history and ponydom's place in the world. The six Bearers of the Elements must draw upon their friendship and the strength of their hearts to stand firm against the darkness. If they fail, it will mean the end of everything.

A My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Fan Fic by Jetfire, Besides the Will of Evil is the sequel to It's A Dangerous Business, Going Out Your Door.

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This Fan Fic contains examples of:

• Animalistic Abomination: Reiziger was once a perfectly normal caribou, but whatever he is now, he most certainly isn't a normal caribou anymore. He maintains the appearance of a normal caribou (if one with solid red eyes) most of the time, but then his mask will drop or "blur", at which something becomes visible that is vast and dark and hungry, with far too many antlers, eyes, teeth and mouths. The author explicitly compares him to Nyarlathotep and Azathoth in a couple of end-of-chapter note.
• Apocalypse How: The Deer War in the distant past was a Class 2 (Planetary Scale, Social Collapse) bordering on a Class 3a (Planetary Scale, Engineered Species Extinction). It was an apocalyptic conflict between the forces of light and Reiziger's armies, with the destructive magic unleashed ravaging the world. It resulted in the collapse of the once powerful deer civilization, and the caribou, one of the six deer species, were completely wiped out.
• Big Bad: Reiziger, whose desire to consume and destroy all of existence is the chief cause of everything bad that happens in the story.
• Brown Note: The screams of the fell beasts cause anyone who hears them to be overwhelmed by terror.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: What Reiziger does to Chrysalis when she attempts to betray him. He burns her alive, and the story makes it abundantly clear what a horrible, agonizing death that is.
• Darkest Hour: As of chapter 33, Twilight has abandoned her friends and Celestia, Canterlot has fallen, Rarity and Rainbow Dash are now controlled by Reiziger, and Pinkie Pie (being infected after Reiziger ate a bit of her) is slowly loosing hope.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Big Bad, Reiziger. His goal seems to be to drain every bit of magic from the land for him to eat.
• Evil Versus Evil: According to Discord, the reason that Reiziger is still around is that the deer need to be taught a lesson.
• Exposition of Immortality: Reiziger, when talking to Trixie, makes no secret of the fact that he's substantially older than pony civilization:
  "Is it so odd that we're civilized?" Trixie asked.
  "Yes," said the black deer. "You must realize that the last time I was out and about in the world, ponies could neither speak nor write. You had barely discovered fire."
• Face–Heel Turn: Rarity and Rainbow Dash get corrupted into Reiziger's minions. Rarity however, guided by her future-sight, intentionally allowed to get herself corrupted.
• Giant Spider: Ungoliants are enormous spider-like monsters created by Reiziger as muscle for his armies. They create an aura of shadow around themselves, and unlike real spiders they have a poisonous stinger hidden beneath their bellies.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: Applejack goes to Gildedale to recruit the Daleponies.
• Happy Ending Override: Given what they ended up releasing, the gang's Find the Cure! adventure in the original ultimately caused more harm than good.
• He's Back!: After getting healed by Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie is back to her normal self. Enough that she can brow-beat Reiziger.
• Hidden Depths: Fluttershy can speak Laewtil, the deer language, as fluently as a native speaker, due to having been raised by the mule deer of the Everfree Forest.
• Hope Spot: Oh, so many of them. Every previous battle leading to the Darkest Hour stated earlier ended up being this. And the Elements are shaping up to be this.
• Horror Hunger: Reiziger is driven by a supernatural example: rather than consuming other beings physically, he is driven by a relentless, ceaseless hunger for the magic and lifeforce of other living things.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Fluttershy dearly loves her friends, but she sometimes wishes she never picked up the Element of Kindness that set this whole thing in motion...
• Karma Houdini: After willingly submitting herself to Reiziger's control and contributing to the annihilation of the entirety of Equestria, Rarity is purified, apologizes, and... receives a full royal pardon from Celestia. Subverted in that pretty much everyone who isn't royalty or one of the mane six dislike her justification for joining Reiziger and want to see her punished.
• Lamarck Was Right: The ability to use magic works this way. All species start out with a limited ability to use magic, but as individuals practice and learn to cast more powerful spells, their growing talent impresses itself in their genes and passes on to their children. So, a powerful sorcerer would birth children with great magical potential, and if those children spent their lives practicing magic their children would be more powerful still. The longer a species has practiced magic, the more powerful its average magic users are.
• Living Lie Detector: The Element of Honesty gives its bearers (like Applejack, or the whitetail deer) the ability to tell when someone is lying and to see through illusions.
• Long-Lived:
  • Magic can greatly extend the lifespans of its users, with more powerful magic users living longer lives than less powerful ones. Mule deer and whitetails, the least powerful deer species, have lifespans measured in centuries. High deer are functionally ageless.
  • Dragons are naturally long-lived, with average lifespans of a thousand years.
• The Medic: This is essentially the power the Element of Kindness, which gives its bearer the ability to heal any affliction of body or mind, has granted both the moose species and Fluttershy.
• Our Dragons Are Different: In addition to the dragons and associated creatures introduced in the prequel, there are also various monsters created by Reiziger during the Deer War and that become part of his forces again when he returns, including wyverns and fell beasts. The latter are almost the size of a small dragon, cause supernatural fear with their shrieks and have only four limbs — wings and taloned legs — and their long necks and tails give them an almost wormlike appearance. Their shrieks cause supernatural terror.
• Our Elves Are Different: Like the previous story, the deer of the Shimmerwood show up, as well as mention of five other deer races.
• Our Wyverns Are Different: Wyverns were among the monsters bred by Reiziger and resemble cobras with dragon wings and blue fire burning in their mouths, eyes, and a slit along their backs
• Physical God: Celestia, Luna and Lady Falalauria are referred to as such, with Celestia and Luna being often referred to as goddesses or divine. Discord is also one, and is far more powerful than any of them. It's also stated that the Mane Six have the potential to become physical gods themselves thanks to their connection to the Elements, with Twilight getting a push.
• Put Them All Out of My Misery: Reiziger, deep down inside, desires death. For himself and all others. Not just death, afterlife, and eventual rebirth either; he's going for complete and utter Cessation of Existence.
  Nordeshang: Yes, the Herd Lord's true darkness is that, in his hunger, he wishes for nonbeing. He desires death, and not even the death that brings new life in the next world- he desires ultimate nonexistence, which is the only true, real evil. He only values things insofar as he can wipe them out. And yet, if he wiped out everything else in the universe, he would still exist, so there would still be some being, and so there would still be good. So even the Herd Lord, for all his power, could never wipe away life and goodness.
• Pyrrhic Victory: The Battle of Cloudsdale. The defenders manage to save the city and annihilate Reiziger's whole army, but he still manages to consume the life force in the city's rainbows, becoming far more powerful than he ever was since his escape.
  "We... we won," said Dash. "Cloudsdale's safe. We won."
  "Then why doesn't it feel like it?" asked Twilight.
• Raised by Natives: After falling off of Cloudsdale as a filly, Fluttershy remained stranded on the ground (as she was still unable to fly well) and was found and adopted by a tribe of mule deer living in the Everfree Forest.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Discord gives one to the Deerfolk in chapter 33.
  • Jerkass Has a Point: Just read what Discord calls them out on. And then go have a look at Feanor, who is supposed to embody the best of the Deer. If you want to make a counterargument, I advise not to.
• Screw You, Elves!: When the ponies learn that deer kept ponies and other sapient races enslaved when they were sapient everyone turns on the deer.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The Archbacks were Reiziger's can, but due to the World Snake being disturbed, his can got destroyed.
• Seers: The Element of Generosity grants its bearers (like Rarity, or the red deer) the ability to peer into the future, in order to be able to tell preemptively when others might need aid. The issue is that they see multiple possible timelines at once, making it difficult to tell what will actually happen.
• Shout-Out:
  • Like its prequel, this story contains multiple shout-outs to The Lord of the Rings.
    • The title itself, like It's A Dangerous Business, Going Out Your Door's, is derived from a specific quote from The Lord of the Rings.
      Frodo: "I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened."
      Gandalf: "So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world Frodo, besides the will of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring. In which case, you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought."
    • Many of the prominent deer characters are based on those found in The Silmarillion. Lady Falalauria is based on Galadriel, and besides her most elk are named after prominent elves, such as the elk king Gil-Galad, or Feanor and Glorfindel. Reiziger shares traits with both Sauron and Morgoth, including one of his old names, Annatar, which was one of Sauron's many aliases.
    • The monsters Reiziger has created for his armies include fell beasts and ungoliants.
  • One of the titles the author was originally considering for the story was The Crawling Caribou.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: The first thing that Reiziger does when he's set free? Eat the world snake.
• Take Away Their Name: When Reiziger was defeated at the end of the Deer War in the distant past, his names were stripped from him by magic. When someone tries to say them now, nothing comes out but a jumble of disordered sounds. The only one still able to say his old names is Discord, due to his immense power and chaotic nature.
• The Starscream: Chrysalis used to be Reiziger's second-in-command during his reign, but made herself queen after his defeat. When he returns to reclaim his control of this changelings, she's not happy about becoming a lieutenant again. So she tries to usurp power from him. It ends poorly. Very poorly.
• Telepathy: The Element of Laughter grants its bearers (such as Pinkie, or the ancient caribou such as Reiziger himself) the ability to read the thoughts and emotions of others, in order to better be able to tell what makes them unhappy or would make them happier.
• Time Abyss: Reiziger was born at the height of the golden age of the deer, before ponies had learned to speak or write, making him substantially older than pony civilization. Discord and the Tree of Harmony are even older — Discord has explicitly been around since the beginning of the world, and while the Tree was only discovered by the deer well after their civilization was established, it is implied to be much older than that.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Reiziger makes a specialty of invading other people's minds and extracting their worst memories to break them emotionally. This works fine for him up until he tries it on Pinkie Pie, who proves to be simply too relentlessly optimistic to break, and instead breaks through Reiziger's own mental barriers as starts rooting around through his memories. It's stated to be the first time in thousands of years that Reiziger felt genuinely powerless.
• Translation Convention: The language spoken by the main characters is specifically stated to be its own language, Equestrian, translated into English. This includes character and place names, which are "translated" from their in-universe "real" forms to give the same impression in English as they'd give in Equestrian. Likewise, the languages and names of the red deer, mule deer, whitetails and elk are presented as the Romance languages (respectively Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French) and those of the caribou and moose as Dutch and German in order to give an idea of their linguistic relation to each other. Laewtil, the language the deer constructed for common use among each other, is represented by Quenya, one of the languages of Tolkien's elves, interspersed with some Sindarin words. The author specifically references Tolkien's use of this same trope in The Lord of the Rings.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom:
  • Trixie probably should have just left that skeletally-thin black deer in the forest instead of bringing him to the circus she worked at as a sideshow attraction.
  • Disturbing the World Snake in the original story ended up releasing Reiziger from his prison, making Applejack, Rainbow Dash, and Rarity this.
• Vampiric Draining: Reiziger has the ability to literally suck the life out of living creatures to heal and strengthen himself, leaving his victims as grey, aged and desiccated husks.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Applejack gets hit hard when she learns she'll outlive her family, and her boyfriend.

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