Metamorphosis

by Alondro

Broken Wings

Lacewing raced upward, her desperate flight hindered by both her heat-warped wings, erratically slanting toward her mother. The jerky, bleary figure in her tear-blurred vision came into clear view agonizingly slowly for her. Too slowly, she frantically realized and beat her pained wings that much harder. Even with the storms blown back she couldn’t reach Damsel quickly enough; so much faster than Lacewing approached appeared the ravaged ragdoll body of the Queen to sail in an ever-steepening arc away from the Sun Stone’s expanding starburst trails of glittering fragments.

Whether or not her mother was already dead didn’t enter into her thoughts. There was no question of what Damsel’s condition would be should she hit the ground at such a speed, and so the only hope remaining was to arrest her fall before then. Lacewing’s dread held within it yet a spark of determination, inborn in their race, to seek the greatest of speeds of any flying thing. And as she poured forth every remaining vestige of her strength, a wave of resistance built ahead of her reaching hooves. Her mother grew clearer in her eyes. Her eyes were closed, her mouth hung ajar from which emanated several of the trails of scarlet spray. A little more, a little faster! She had almost broken through the wall… and then she was there, and had passed her mother by. Braking in a wide arc, she soared back and gingerly caught Damsel from beneath in her forehooves, straining to slow the deadly descent. Fast enough she had been, but not strong enough. The whining wind from the fall lessened, but it was too terribly clear it was still too fast. Damsel weakly coughed out a gout of crimson sputum and drew a gagging breath. She lived! But only until the downward path met its inevitable and abrupt end, Lacewing knew. The royal pair fell together toward the muddy earth and Lacewing placed herself between Damsel’s bleeding body and the ground, preparing to soften the impact with her own aching flesh. She clenched her eyes and awaited what would either be blinding pain or sudden oblivion.

And then, unexpectedly, another pair of hooves joined hers and a moment later several more. She lifted one eyelid uncertainly and beheld a number of her subject, as exhausted and breathless as she with wings as maimed as her own, pushing themselves to their own limits to save their Queen. They slowed steadily and the ground at last no longer approached. Levelling their descent at a few hooves above the earth, they gingerly cradled Damsel and, Lacewing leading, they carried the Queen back to the distant herd and laid her upon a small mound of the dried grass mats which a number of the Flutters quickly piled in preparation. Her body lay awkwardly upon its side while her chest still shakily rose and fell, all four legs pierced with crystal spines and needles splintered from the Stone. Her lovely wings had been torn completely off, leaving only shattered bloody remnants of the joints attached to her flight muscles. And to Lacewing’s horror, one great jagged shard the size of a unicorn’s horn jutted out from Damsel’s abdomen, no doubt at least that length more lay buried within her body.

One Flutter nervously asked, “Should we take the shard out, Princess?”

Lacewing, observing her mother’s face screwed in pain as consciousness slowly emerged, at that moment, nearly said yes. She was no foalish and naïve pampered Princess. Timid she had been, but always she had quietly learned all she could of many disciplines. She knew what these grievous wounds meant. Their union would be a brief one. Yet still, defiance won out shortly. “No, do not touch it. The cut will be smooth and bleed terribly. We have no potions for such a wound. That piece of stone, as horrible as it looks, is keeping her alive.”

Damsel’s eyes drifted open and wearily sought her daughter. She had heard what was said. “Take it out,” she coughed. “There’s no hope for me. I’ve failed us.”

Lacewing regarded her mother’s despairing face and set her own jaw firmly. “No, Mother. Not yet! We have not lost yet! We won’t lose anypony else!” Swiftly she called for several of her subjects to pull apart the Stone’s platform of branches and arrange them into a bier. The green limbs were slightly charred, but still pliable and in minutes they had woven a bed for their stricken Queen, upon which they placed the cleanest of their mats and blankets before tenderly laying Damsel upon it.

Not long after they’d finished and packed up what meager supplies remained, the weary and dispirited Flutters felt the first returning wintry winds carry across the plain. The brief respite of the Sunstone’s detonation had ended.

“We must go now!” Lacewing cried. “The windigoes won’t stay away for long. They will surely realize that we’ve played our last desperate card. We must reach the mountains! Among the peaks and through the passes we may lose them if they have not caught up to us by then!” She was attempting to deceive herself as much as her subjects. The windigoes could feel and follow their fear, she knew in her heart, the most labyrinthine path the Flutters could take would be only a barrier to their own escape. If they were discovered too soon, it was the end for them all.

But the little spark of defiance kindled gradually greater in Lacewing’s heart. She would not fall without expending every last wisp of her strength against the wicked windigoes, she resolved. And so she drove her tired subject onward, her heart burning within her ever more fiercely, chastising and cheering them in turn as they plodded along bearing the fallen Queen in their midst.

Into the brooding shadows of the great southern mountains, the small band of remaining Flutters fled. Beyond was their hope that they might find a mild land through which the windigoes had never wailed and cast their cursed frozen blight. Bearing with three steady and trusted servants the shuddering sylvan bier of stricken Queen Damsel, the Princess Lacewing led them toward the narrow rising path that would lead into the towering spires of unyielding rock and ice. Their going was slow. Damsel’s bier was ungainly, and through first the mire and then through the thickening snow their progress was hindered. So it had been with the Stone; but that burden, at least, had protected them. This new weight hampered both heart and limb and left them bare to the merciless storms.

The Flutter Ponies dripped with chill water while fresh snows swirled down and melted upon them once more, the brief mockery of early spring brought about by the Stone’s destruction swept away by the vast unnatural winter; silently marching, their spirits and bodies both too weak to sustain flights. Ever wary were they of the approaching but as yet distant keening whinnies of the demons which sought them, the dismal calls once more returned to assault their twitching ears which some clamped to the sides of their heads in a futile effort to shut them out. It wasn’t the great swarm which had assaulted them, for they heard what could not have been the cries of more than a triad. But, now bereft of any weapon or defense, even three were too many.

The Flutter Ponies whinnied in terror, and some attempted to break out on their own, but Lacewing’s stern voice rose above them and commanded that they stay together. They struggled onward for many paces, then the Queen’s soft voice called to her daughter, “Dear one. Have the bearers lay me down and then send the herd ahead. I… would speak to you alone.”

Lacewing opened her mouth as if to protest, but quickly drew her lips tight together and bowed her head briefly. The three who carried the Queen with her and heard the words did as they were bidden. Then Lacewing ordered all to go on as quickly as they could. They did so in silence, though foreboding lay upon every heart they did not disobey those who had led them for so long.

“Daughter,” Damsel whispered, watching her people fleeing toward the leading up-thrusted feet of the glowering mountains. “My life can’t be saved now, and I hinder my people’s escape. But I can be released from what is worse than death.” She motioned to the sharp crystal protruding from her belly. “Pull it out, my beloved daughter.”

“You’ll bleed to death,” Lacewing stated bluntly, realizing the hopelessness of this plight, yet driven to offer at least a token protest nonetheless.

“It’s better than leaving myself to the teeth of the windigoes,” she took a weary breath, slowly. “I would never survive the path through the mountains, we both know it. And I would be a burden slowing the whole herd down until the windigoes amassed and destroyed us. Our escape depends now solely upon speed, which I lack. At least my suffering will be over, and I won’t weigh you down. I am so sorry I failed you, my daughter, and all our kind. I… was a terribly foolish Queen, vain and arrogant.”

“No mother,” Lacewing leaned down upon her knees to kiss her mother’s forehead. “You were brave and bold. In times past, your strength saved us from many enemies. There was nothing you or anypony else could do against these demons. We don’t even know what weapon would serve to vanquish them all, if such a thing exists at all.”

Damsel took her daughter’s hoof and laid it upon the shard and smiled bitterly, “Perhaps it would have been better to use the spell in the Valley and put an end to ourselves in our homes. A last stand of defiance. How many souls would have been saved had I not feared a mortal end?”

“Don’t think any more upon it, Mother,” Lacewing spoke as tenderly as she could bring herself to, for love and sorrow now parried with a mounting anger in her soul. “Had you suggested it then, even I would have thought you mad and stopped you, along with, I suspect, the lion’s share of our subjects. We didn’t know… we simply didn’t know how helpless we were. And had we done so, how many could we have hoped to destroy even then? Many still despoiled the pony lands. They would have endured, even as we perished.” She lay her cheek upon her mother’s and nuzzled her affectionately. “You led us as well as anypony could in such chaotic times. Perhaps there simply was no right choice. I cannot see one. And nopony else has spoken of another path either.” She drew her head back and looked long upon the jagged piece of the Sunstone rising out of her mother’s body. “So be it,” she said at last.

Lacewing steeled herself and took hold of the sharp crystal’s smoothest planes between her teeth, barely able to prevent herself retching at the coppery taste of her mother’s blood upon it. She pulled, and the smooth edges slid easily from the wound as it were a freshly whetted blade. Her mother shook violently as it left her body, but her cries she held within so as not to cut her daughter’s heart with her pain.

The dreadful torrent of blood both Damsel and Lacewing had expected did not come. By some strange fortune (or misfortune, in this case) the sharp crystal spear had almost miraculously passed safely by all the largest vessels within Damsel’s belly. And upon entry, the shard which was still scorching hot cauterized most of the smaller vessels. Pulling the shard free reopened only a few of these. The wound bled, indeed, but in another insult to injury, she would now not die from blood loss alone.

Three pairs of sullen red dots appeared on the edge of their vision in a momentary parting of the swirling blizzards. The windigoes were near.

“Oh no,” Damsel cringed. “I waited too long. I feared death and now an even greater horror awaits me, unless-“ her eyes found the bloodstained crystal which Lacewing had let fall to the ground. “Damsel, I beg you, take the shard. Swiftly now, there’s no time.”

Lacewing lifted the shard in her trembling hooves, regarding it as a thing utterly diseased and defiled, a tightness building in her chest with the horrible suspicion of what this request must mean, “Mother, what are you asking of me?”

Damsel’s small voice spoke weakly, apologetically, “I’m so sorry… you must use it… place it upon my throat. Afterward, you must take the shard with you my daughter, though you will wish to cast it away. A poor weapon it is, but should you escape the windigoes, who knows what creatures lurk beyond the mountains? Do not hesitate to defend yourself, my beautiful, brave daughter. Oh, how you have grown, and I am proud of you. Once a timid little caterpillar, you’ve emerged from your chrysalis and made a wondrous change in yourself. You’ll grown up strong, my dear, I’m sure of it, and lead our people to greatness again. Now, hurry, please. The crystal’s edge is sharp… it will cut in an instant.”

“M-mother, I don’t-,” Lacewing’s breathing grew heavy. “I don’t want to. I can’t do that to you!” It was one thing to let her mother pass away; but to take her life, to put an end to it with her own hooves… that was just too terrible an act to perform! Such acts ruined a pony, she’d been taught long ago. It turned them into something else; a transformation took place within their hearts and minds. From what others bore witness of, ponies who killed could never truly seemed to be whole again.

Damsel, wincing, bowed her head to observe the pooling blood beneath the wound from which the shard was pulled. “Lacewing, dear daughter, I know… we have been cursed by a cruel fate and choices are sorely lacking. But the windigoes are coming. I… I will die on my own in time. You know what will become of my soul if they find me alive. Please, don’t let them take me and destroy me utterly. Set my spirit free, to a place they cannot ever reach. Grant me this last mercy, I beg you.” She touched her daughter’s fore-hooves and gently brought it down until the razor edge of the crystal lay upon the feebly pulsing side of her throat. “Swiftly now. I love you, dearest one. Farewell.”

Lacewing’s chest heaved with grief and horror at what she was being forced to do, yet there was no option left. She would never let the demons devour the soul of her dear mother, the noble and brave Queen of the Flutters. She shut her eyes tightly and clenched the frogs of her hooves around the crystal shard, the edge cutting into her flesh as well as her mother’s, but the agony in her heart was already so great that compared to it she felt nothing else, and drew it sharply across her mother’s throat while sobbing, “Goodbye, mother.” A splash of warm fluid struck Lacewing’s forelegs and a sharp gasp of breath from her mother forced her eyes open to bear witness to the unambiguous reality of what had taken place. Her mother’s wide, tear-filled eyes met Lacewing’s; the gasping mouth, filling with the same crimson liquid which gushed from the gash in Damsel’s throat in ebbing spurts, mouthed garbled words of desperate comfort. Frozen in place, the crystal shard still slicing into her hooves, Lacewing could only stare numbly as the eyes of her mother gradually lost their brightness and her body sagged limply into the bier.

A harsher, closer, evil whinny shook Lacewing from her shock. Still gazing at her mother’s body, she moved stiffly, mechanically, depositing the bloody shard into the little bag of belongings as her mother wished. She had to obey Mother’s last commands. She needed the shard. It could kill. The Sunstone could kill. She could kill. Everything was death and pain and blood and ice. There was nothing else left in the world. She stood, placed the bag upon herself and adjusted the strap and took several jerky steps backward in the show.

Her mother was still lying there. Silent. Still. Staring unseeing into the swirling blizzard.

Something cracked within her. Somewhere deep in her mind, something gave way and all manner of flecks and fragments of conflicting thought and emotion flooded together into a swirling torrent. Mother… mother… she’d killed… they made her… they forced it… She loved her. She killed her. She… saved her? Mother was safe now, wasn’t she? It wasn’t her fault. The windigoes had killed Mother, they’d killed the Valley, killed her people. They were pure evil. Where had they come from? What wickedness spawned such vile things that made death the only salvation? Why did the windigoes have to exist?

“WHHYYYYYYYYYYY!!!” she cried in a broken, anguished shriek which echoed her pain across the entire mountainside, even to her subjects halfway into the first league of the pass. “CURSE YOU DEMONS!!! I HATE YOU!!”

The whinnies came again, even closer, almost mirthful in their wickedness, mocking her impotent rage which only fed their horrible power. They were assured. They would come and nothing could stop them now; they drank up the hate and soon they would feed upon the souls of those who felt it and the terror they brought with them.

But Lacewing stood, scorched and molten within, sorrow and terror consumed in a seething rage, a fresh and wildly potent sensation she’d never experienced in her life. Had she known the word, she would have called it ‘bloodlust’. Her eyes were clear and doubt was for the moment erased. “Never again,” she growled, turned and raced through the gales to join her people, but no longer in fear. Her fury drove her into a madness out of which a new desire burgeoned in her pounding, aching heart: REVENGE!!! Destroy the windigoes or herself, whichever was needed to deny them any further triumph! Launching herself into the sky, her wings roared through the air. Faster! FASTER!! She had to move faster!

It seemed only moments before she breached the ridge and crashed down among her people, her delicate wings torn to shreds from the unfortunate combination of overheating, overwork, and inexperience. They shrank from her wild eyes and blood stained body as she announced, “Queen Damsel is dead! I am your Queen now! I set her free!” She laughed madly and trotted drunkenly around the edge of the cliff, flapping her tattering wings haphazardly. “They cannot get her! They’ll never have her now!”

Lacewing hearkened to the disappointed wails of the windigoes far down below who’d discovered they’d been denied their next victim and screamed at them in mirthful savagery, “That’s right! I saved her from you, you twisted, vile parasites! No more of us will become your fodder!” Her voice rose into a harsh hoarse scream, “Even if we must all BURN to ashes and dash our ruin upon the rocks, YOU WILL NOT HAVE US!!” Then she turned and dashed toward the craggy cleft leading into the high pass while her people drew back from her ferocious gaze. “Follow me! I am your Queen! The last Queen of the Flutter Ponies! We will either cross these mountains or throw ourselves from the cliffs! Whatever end is waiting for us, the demons will not be it!”

In fear of her mad rage and of the windigoes’ fury, the Flutters spent every last mote of their strength in the desperate flight, straining their own jeweled wings into tatters matching their new Queen’s against the ice-flecked gales blasting through the narrow mountain pass while Lacewing’s tender hooves pounded the rock in a savage war rhythm beneath them, leaving a trail of red-stained snow behind her, running and running, away from the windigoes and the agony of what she’d left behind; her peace, her joy, her innocence, her happiness. There was only the quest for vengeance left of her, and that so alien a sensation she felt as if she no longer knew the creature in whose chest her heart now frantically beat. Wing muscles still weary from their previous effort ripped themselves apart in the fight and flight, but they would be of no use any longer anyway. All that mattered now was beating the windigoes, pointless speculations upon means and method no longer were a hindrance.

On and on their frantic pace continued through the twisting passages between the icy crags at the roof of the world. The whinnies of the windigoes were at left far behind as the Flutters burned out their stamina borne of fear and Lacewing her rage and transient madness. Little by little, in twos and threes, they dropped to the snow panting and exhausted, shivering from cold and over-exertion in the thin, frigid air. At last even Lacewing’s fury could fuel her wrathful charge no further and she collapsed into a drift. As one unfamiliar with blind rage before invariably discovers, it soon burns itself out without the ample fuel acquired from carefully fostered habitual hatred in the minds of those to whom it comes naturally. There her people found her shortly thereafter, quaking not so much from the bitterness around her as from that within as the greedy inferno of anger exhausted her untempered reserves and dwindled to furtive flickers.

Gingerly, several elder Flutters who’d surmised what desperate action must have taken place between Damsel and her daughter, lifted up their broken young queen between them and sought a place of refuge from the blasting gales. Coming upon a sheltered cloven vale in the midst of the mountain’s peaks, they turned aside and discovered a deep cleft in the wall. Inside, the cavern appeared to have been split open by some great blow, narrowing to finger-width in its deepest depths, as though a giant blade striking deeply had riven the rock in ancient days. Upon a relatively smooth slab, they laid Lacewing upon a few of their woven grass blankets and rejoined the remainder of the herd near the entrance to watch and wait for either their Queen to command them to make their own end or for the windigoes to return and finish them. Clustering together, they sat and shivered without hope, misery overflowing every heart.

Little by little, angry murmurings blended with terrified whimpers of despair. All illusions of hope now utterly dashed, the Flutter ponies began to express at last the long-held resentments within them. Some blamed the Pony Tribes and wished their ends to be as horrid or worse than their own. Others, though more reserved, felt the Queen and Princess had been fools and waited too long to leave. The bickering went on, though however softly the Flutters spoke of their dismay and blame, the cavern’s shape amplified every whisper and carried all their miserable voices to the wilting ears of the Princess.

Unable to block out the echoing sentiments of her subjects, Lacewing then turned away and curled herself tightly, and heard a tinkle as her bag shifted. She glanced sideways and noticed that the blood-stained shard of the Sunstone had fallen upon the stone. It lay there, and she felt no compulsion to retrieve it. With the bravado burned out of her by utter exhaustion, she knew she couldn’t do that again to another pony, not even to save their souls from consumption. It made her sick just to look at it. Not for all that display of wrath and pride had shown, she was still just a frightened foal at heart, covering her helplessness with a useless tantrum. Her sliced fore hooves throbbed in pain. She hurt everywhere, she realized, and her heart worst of all. All her life now was pain. At least Mother was away from all of the pain now. And Lacewing wanted to be free of it as well.

“I just wanted to have a simple, happy life with Mother and all the Flutters back in the Valley,” she spoke quietly to the patiently listening stones. “I was happy just being… me. Timid, quiet, never having to raise my voice. It was fine that way. And now it’s gone, all of it. Our valley, our lives, my mother… even myself.” The cold, harsh, unavoidable reality of their plight trickled through her mind. “We can’t run any more. It’s still too far and we’re too weak. We’re lost. The next time they find us… it’s over. If we can’t end our lives ourselves before they catch us, they’ll eat our souls… there’s no way out.”

Her eyes wandered back to the shard. Its bladed edges still lay ready for whatever purpose she decided to put it to. She reached for it, calmly resigned in her mind to plunge it straight through her heart. Yet as she beheld it, she saw that it now shone dimly, even in the dark cavern, but with a fell and fey mist of unearthly impure light which seemingly had begun kindling within it. Lacewing ruefully smirked, “Is that from what I’ve done with you? There are still quite a few of us. I wonder how many of us you’ll be able to handle. Can you offer us all the way to escape?” She continued, swearing vows to whatever would listen, good or evil. “I’d take anything now, anything to get away from this miserable life of certain death. If anyone or anything offered me the power to destroy every windigo in the world, I’d take it, no matter what it cost me.” She mused pointlessly on who’d need to be punished when whatever fantastic miracle occurred at the last possible second and she would rise above all other living things in power and glory to smite her enemies. “And the cowardly ponies too deserve my revenge. They left us to this. Not a shred of love, friendship, or pity could they spare for us… they don’t deserve any in return. I should take every bit of love away from them and leave them as hollow and miserable as they’ve left me, empty of anything but bitter sorrow and futile anger.”

She didn’t expect a reply. And yet, the facet of the crystal facing her shone brightly with a sickly light and a vibrant yellow eye with a violently red pupil gazed out at her and a deep and crooning voice sounding at once both infinitely far away and immediately present rose from the shard, “Well now, my dear, I do believe I can help you with that… if you’re willing to strike a little bargain.”

Author's Note:

Clearly, the voice belongs to none other than.... Oogie Boogie!

Yep, this was "A Nightmare Before Christmas" crossover all along!

And you can totally trust me.

Comments

[mastermenthe]

This is amazing. People need to accept this as headcanon.

[A_Stupid_Name]

I don't understand. Couldn't she just use computer viruses to deal with the windigoes?

[Alondro]

7900361 Well, if I wanted to be lame and have Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith suddenly save the day, they'd come flying in and drop a nuke in the middle of the Windigo Mother Ship.

[A_Stupid_Name]

7906884

And the sequel will have the Windigo Queen sending Discord to Equestria.

Today you will once again fight for our friendship! *tear rolls up the forehead*

[Alondro]

7900073 Alas, people around here only want thoughtless crossovers, overpowered OCs, moody alicorns, and random humans ending up in Equestria for no reason.

I'm following some astoundingly good stories that have only a few hundred likes, when they should be at the top of the list.