Flurry Heart has requested a very unusual bedtime story. Shining Armor senses something is up, but he also knows that children occasionally come across feelings they don't have words for yet. Books can supply those words.
On a less cerebral note, hopefully there’s some entertainment to be had watching Shining Armor flounder through a novel that common sense dictates he shouldn't be reading to a foal before bed. That 'Thriller' tag is present in the banner for a reason.
This is an entry in the Snippet Series, an anthology of old oneshots I (and my good buddy Str8aura) wrote based around interesting pics I found. New ones will be posted every Thursday for the foreseeable future.
Chapters (1)
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In the context of the story, I’d say this is more appropriate music for her:
Medusa is a bad story.
Not sure which story drew me in more.
Would definitely enjoy reading more of both.
*swooped
Nitpick: Flurry Heart’s magic aura is golden, and Shining Armor’s is magenta.
I was expecting the embedded story to be a straight retelling of the story of Medusa, so I was pleasantly surprised you made her into a tragic hero.
Dawww (am I spelling that right?) I love this.
I'm a pretty new user here and still getting into the swing of things, so this is my first thumbs-up (or whatever you call it.)
P.S. I'm glad it wasn't Of Mice and Mares too.
Excellent stuff in both layers. And if it's Scootaloo's favorite, it's safe to assume that there's a happy ending. Or at least an awesome one. Thank you for a story that's equal parts thrilling and heart-wrenching. (Also, very nice dodge on one of the more uncomfortable questions regarding gorgons: Is their body hair also snakes?)
So how does Maredusa's story end?
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I’m gonna tie up most of the Snippet Series’s dangling plot threads in the inevitable season finale upload. The current outline has closure for Flurry’s story, as well as the other popular ones I’ve written featuring Lightning Dust, Stock Image, and Vitty. Probably won’t roll it out til early July, though.
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Fix’d. As per usual, you always seem to catch the tiniest but most important mistakes in my stories.
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I’m humbled to be your first ever upvote. If you liked this story, try flipping through the other installments in the Snippet anthology for more short and simple oneshots. This fic is actually quite long compared to the others, so if you’re looking for more bite-sized scenes of pastel horses living their lives, you might find some.
Str8aura and I do aim to please with the works we each publish.
Wow! What a read! I really loved this, it takes skill to write a "story within a story" where both layers are equally engaging! I ate this up faster than Pinkie eats a cupcake!
Also I adore the idea that Scootaloo is Flurry's tutor. I'm definitely going to have to check out the story you linked about that
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I commented on reddit, but it deserves a comment here, if a bit abridged.
Once again, thank you so much for writing this. I greatly enjoyed reading it, and I can certainly feel the pain of "unease" when it comes to an unresolved story, especially one that is a bit more intense than usual. I will certainly be thinking of little Flurry Heart when I approach fanfics that straddle my comfort zone.
Scoots sure has an interesting taste in literature.
I wonder how Flurry would deal with literature with non-traditional narrative structure where the endings don't normally happen at the end or stories of a time traveler told from the perspective of someone living in normal time.
There's a missing word (or comma) somewhere in here. I don't want to suggest which word or where because different answers to those questions would change the meaning and/or tone of the sentence.
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It really is vexing to try for a decently complex sentence, only to trip over a neglected conjunction. I’ve fix’d it. Thanks, chief.
As for Flurry’s capacity for nonlinear stories... well, my depictions of Flurry Heart (all two of them) see her as fairly bright for her age but utterly dominated by foalhood emotions like fear, excitement, worry, and attachment. (If this were Magic the Gathering, she’d be a very Red mage.) I don’t suspect a nonlinear story would challenge her too much, but she’d likely get bored and drop the book after realizing that the ending just got revealed.
Poor sweetie - I hope this isn't one of the nastier endings such a book could have, though I suspect it's less horror than Shiny thinks it is. Scoot isn't stupid, she knows REALLY well what happens when you overwhelm a kid's coping factors.
Rusty Horseshoe, anyone?
Of course, the mean part is that WE never get to find out how the story ends!
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You’re two steps ahead of everyone else; my plan for the Snippet Series season finale is to wrap up all the loose ends in the anthology so far, with the Rusty Horseshoe story playing into the Scootaloo/Flurry Heart resolution. Guess I’ll have to figure out a new angle now, though.
And don’t worry about Maredusa’s ending. That’ll get revealed in the finale when another character who’s already read the book comments on it.
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No, no, it's okay! You can write the story how you wanted and just let me feel smart! It happens rarely enough as it is!
I hope we don't skip ahead too much, I'm really interested in Maredusa.
Well this is a interestingly dark tale, i am going to go out on a limb here and take a guess that they latter find that Maredusa was real, i mean almost every other mythological being within mlp turned out to be real so why not her too.
That said Shining is lucky that this story seems like it is lighter then the myth of medusa, mattering on what version you find that story is a nasty one, but thankfully just the first chapter of Maredusa's story is more then enough for me to confirm that her origins are nicer, and her fate might be better too.
You can't just leave us hanging, really want to see how her story ended
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No worries; more Maredusa will come. The MLP Subreddit is my testing ground for new Snippet ideas, and just yesterday, I put up one that furthers this story. You can take a peek at it if you like.
Here's me hoping that it ends up something like the subordinate here ends up marrying the most beautiful pony in all the lands and lives happily ever after that she's a Gorgon doesn't matter
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Yeesh, a pony gorgon would be a living ball of snakes all over... millions/billions of snakes, I'm not normally Ophidiophobic but that image would be a good step towards becoming that way.
Ey, it's interesting to see how other writers depict Flurry Heart past her baby years, and while I didn't get the full picture in the Season One Finale, I think this completes it.
I believe part of what makes this story work is that you bring in a question/mystery to answer for both stories: the question of Flurry Heart wanting to read the book in particular, and the question of... first, the meaning of the bolded code phrase and then why Maredusa's feeling down. It's also, at the risk of sounding pretentious, circular in a good way: we're introduced to Flurry Heart's mystery first (though I think room for improvement here would be starting the story with Flurry's section first before moving onto the story so that it's quickly established in the reader's mind that, first and foremost, it's likely a Flurry Heart story first than a Maredusa one; this is especially since the opening paragraph, while it sets the scene/context for the Maredusa story, doesn't really bring up any obvious mystery/question for the reader to see solved), then we get the Maredusa questions brought up, followed by those questions answered before Flurry's questions gets resolved.
For a short story involving an excerpt of a much longer story, the order of arcs starting and finishing within each other is a great touch. Not to mention the surface similarities between the two as well (such as both of the main characters being princesses).
All in all, I think this is a great short story with nice characterization for your version of Flurry Heart, along with good worldbuilding/history that doesn't interfere with the reading experience. Thank you for it!
Do you mean "thin book", or perhaps "thing"?
In all of these cases, you also underlined the space after the title
Also, in the last sentence, Of Mice and Mares. includes the period in the underlining, and I am curious to know if that is intentional
An oddball ghost happened across your fic and read it. Have a review!
Aw nooooo! Please don’t cry!
You’re literature is great, I just wish that Medusa‘s story was a story you could actually read somewhere…
I would leave a positive review, but other people already covered everything, so all I could do is repeat.
Have a mustache of honor for your skill!