Chapter 1
I was blissing out, strumming my harp on a bench near downtown Ponyville, such as it was. I’d just started a difficult series of arpeggios based on a Fibonacci sequence cross-referenced with motifs taken from the latest pop song by Sapphire Shores – I know, I know, it sounds like I’m just playing random notes when I start something like that, but honestly there’s a method to my madness – when I suddenly realized that the shadow that had fallen over me while my eyes were closed was not from one of the pretty little shade clouds that Blossomforth was always so diligent about scattering artfully around the sky after Rainbow Dash finished her 10-second crusade of cloud-bursting.
“Oh, hello Twilight,” I said, in a cheerful voice as I switched to a holding pattern in 7/8 time. She had that look on her face, like I was about to be knocked unconscious and dragged off to some horrible fate – if you’ve known her for any length of time, I’m sure you’ve seen it.
“Lyyyyra,” she said, grinning widely. “I need your help with something. Something only you can help me with. Yes, yes.” As she spoke, her purple magical field levitated a damp rag from an opaque brown bottle sticking out of one of her saddlebags. I couldn’t help but glance at it.
“Are you about to kidnap me?” I asked, shifting to a minor key with a sort of pulsing pattern of volume changes.
Twilight opened her mouth, then closed it. She tittered nervously, glancing at the rag, then frowned and forced a serious face. “Yes,” she said, before shoving the rag into my face. Everything got a little fuzzy, and I heard a discordant tinkle as my harp fell from my magical grip and bounced to the ground.
When I woke up I was inside a glowing magical circle, like something out of an old mare’s tale. There were candles with green and black flames at each point of the star – six of them, so I suppose it was more of a hexagram than a pentagram – and I’d been dressed in a diaphanous robe made of nearly transparent silk, and laid to rest on a marble altar of some sort, cold against the thin fur of my belly. My harp was nowhere to be seen, so I started whistling an ominous ditty, and tried to keep from grinning. I’m pretty sure I failed. The last time I thought I was keeping my emotions under my control, Cherry Berry and Rainbow Dash both confirmed I’d been jumping up and down like Pinkie Pie on catnip and chanting ‘cider cider cider’.
“Finally!” Twilight Sparkle said, from the darkness. I saw her eyes first, reflected in the candles – they were an odd color, green and purple, like the odd candles, and seemed to be smoking. It was classic dark magic – not to be confused with corrupted magic, which is usually green or red, but otherwise the normal sparkly unicorn aura. “I knew there was one anomaly left in Ponyville, but despite triple-checking all the records in town hall, I couldn’t find any likely candidates. Then I realized what I’d been missing – you didn’t die in Ponyville at all.”
My whistling died off, leaving the melody hanging unfinished. “I didn’t die at all,” I said, confused. “Did I? Am I a ghost? Have I been wandering around as a phantom, assuming that everypony can see me and misinterpreting things they say to themselves or other people all this time?” I leaned forwards eagerly, then sat back. “No, that doesn’t make sense. Yesterday Rose and I had a long conversation about music, and there was nopony else in the shop. She even called me by name a couple of times. Not to mention that some of the positions I’ve been doing with Bon Bon don’t even work if there’s only one pony…”
“No, no, you didn’t die, ‘per se’,” Twilight said, holding her hooves up to make the quotes around ‘per se’. I’m not entirely sure that was grammatically correct, but then my specialty has always been music, not grammar. “Celestia has a spell over Equestria that keeps anypony from ‘dying’ – “ the hooves again “ – from unnatural causes, but the spell is a little bit… flawed. It leaves a temporal anomaly clinging to the ponies it saves, which is wreaking havoc on my attempts to study time travel. So I’ve been going around and ‘correcting’ the ‘mistakes’.” She sighed. “In this case, you ‘didn’t’ die when Princess Cadance tricked you into jumping off a cliff, in the crystal caves.”
“Oh, right,” I said, nodding eagerly. “I remember that! I thought that had to be a dream, when the mind control finally went away – there’s no way I should have survived that fall. I mean, there were those sharp pointy rocks at the bottom and everything.”
“Stalagmites.”
“Bless you!” I said, grinning. Twilight glowered, which was impressive with the already glowing eyes. “So how do you correct the mistakes? I’m guessing it’s something more elaborate than just killing me, since you’ve got all of… well… this,” I said, waving a hoof around to indicate the circle.
“Nope!” Twilight said. “I fix it by killing you. All of ‘this’ is to make sure your replacement is physically identical and has all your memories – I can’t have ponies going missing all over town, can I? Ponies would talk!”
“Ooooh,” I said. “That’s clever. And morally neutral, since you’re creating a life to make up for the one you’re taking.” I couldn’t help but smile as I felt the adrenaline surging through my body. “Do I get to fight back?”
“It’s better than neutral! I’m replacing an unnatural life with a supernatural replacement life,” Twilight said. “I’m pretty sure that’s at least 20% better. And, no.” There was a purple flash, and my body went limp, and numb. I was still fully conscious, but I couldn’t move a muscle, and the air and stone underneath me didn’t even feel cold anymore. “I can’t take the risk of you injuring my little Spiky Wikey.”
I would have asked about Spike – nopony had seen him up and about in a few months – but I couldn’t actually say anything, being paralyzed and all. It was all really… arousing? I know, I know, this was all completely nonconsensual, so I should have been repelled by it as a matter of principle, and if my body was feeling any physical arousal, I was too numb to notice, but I couldn’t help but imagine it all as some elaborate work up to the best role-play ever. I mean, as long as Spike had been transformed into some sort of fearsome beast – being killed by little Spikey Wikey who only came up to my shoulder would have just been silly.
I shouldn’t have worried. A few seconds later Twilight’s eyes faded out, and a faint glow illuminated a large cavern, mostly rocks but with the occasional purple crystal. The circle was gone, the candles were gone, and the altar had been replaced by a slimy natural formation – somehow, I could still feel the wet even though I couldn’t feel the cold. And there was Spike – or at least, the dragon had Spike’s coloration, lavender and lime green, and still had a bit of the dorky clumsiness that the little dragon was best known for. He was larger – a lot larger – but still recognizably Spike. I would have waved to him, but as I mentioned before I couldn’t move.
I could still use magic, though, and I used it to start a tinkly theme going, building slowly in energy and tension as the dragon slithered across the cavern towards me. Normally, I would have said this was a hideous oversight on Twilight’s part, but honestly the amount of magic I could channel was very weak, even for me. I don’t think I could have swung my harp hard enough to swat a fly, let alone fight off a dragon. Also, my harp was nowhere to be seen.
“Hey, Lyra,” Spike said, in a sort of glum voice that implied he didn’t exactly want to do this. “You’re numb, right?” He reached out and lifted one of my forelimbs into the air, then let it fall. “Guess so. That’ll make this easier.” He licked his lips nervously. “Twilight says I’m supposed to savor this, and, um…” The music quavered querulously, tempting him to continue his explanation. “I kind of enjoy it,” he said, cringing back a bit, embarrassed. “But I can’t stand it when ponies scream. The first pony she gave me just screamed and screamed and I still have nightmares, and when I see her in the market I just – well, I don’t go to the market so much anymore.”
Twilight and I were going to have words. Or, well, Twilight and my replacement were going to have words, presumably. Either way, it was clear that she was abusing her poor dragon, forcing him to grow into a monster and kill ponies. The ponies were none the worse for wear – I assumed he was talking about Rose, who’d told me about her terribly realistic dream about being torn to pieces by a giant Spike – but Spike himself seemed to be taking it harder. A little bit of the anger snuck into the music, and Spike glowered, then snapped off my horn.
Ow.
Well, it didn’t really hurt. There was just an intense sensation of pressure, from the fingers on my horn, and the others holding my head down to keep my head from being thrown back, and it quickly ramped up to the point where I wondered – afterwards, because it was all so fast – if I’d been in serious danger of my skull giving way first. Then a loud ‘snap’ and the sudden relief of pressure, and Spike dropped the mint-green spiral of ivory to the floor of the cave with a clatter. That left me completely helpless, with about as much agency as a plush doll – I could blink, and move my eyes, but that was about it.
“No music,” Spike said. “It’s better when you can’t move. I don’t want to think of you as a pony.” He waited, as if I was going to somehow respond, so I blinked twice, then sort of lay there helplessly because, really, what else was I going to do?
Spike has a really long tongue. A really, really long tongue. I’m going to have to go talk to him sometime, outside of the whole ‘being kidnapped and murdered’ scenario, because, wow. It was long enough for him to wrap it around my body several times, under the silly little sacrificial robe, and again I could feel it just fine – the pressure and wet slithering as it snaked through my fur, exploring my body. It probably would have been arousing, or at least ticklish, being licked in some of the places Spike touched in his little tongue bath, but it seemed like pleasure and ticklishness and pain were all on the circuit that Twilight had disabled, so it mostly just felt strange. I’m a strange pony, though, so I still found it pretty sexy.
I really need to get him to try that sometime when I can actually feel, though.
“I thought you’d taste like mint,” he said, sounding disappointed. “You taste different than the others, though – they all tasted kind of sour, and you’re… I don’t know how to describe it.” He licked a few more times. “I wonder if your meat tastes better too?”
Twilight’s spell was very good – I could hear and feel the cracking and snapping of my bones, and the ‘pop’ as my shoulder was yanked out of its joint, and the stretching, tearing sensation, and the blood pooling beneath my body from the bloody stump, but it didn’t hurt at all. Not even when Spike cauterized the wound with a quick burst of flame, filling the air with the nauseating smell of burning meat and hair. It was a very impressive numbing spell, and I wondered how long it had taken her to learn it, while Spike noisily devoured my foreleg. After a while, the slurping and gobbling and the crunch of bones being pulverized by giant dragon teeth died down, and he’d licked off almost all the blood by the time his face came back into view.
“Wow, yeah. You’re delicious,” he said, his tongue snaking down to snag my horn, yanking it into his mouth where he crunched it up like a pretzel. I tried to smile at him, but I’m pretty sure it didn’t work.
Then he rolled me off the raised platform of rock, and my skull bounced off the ground – it probably should have hurt a lot, especially considering that the stub of my horn was the point of impact. I did see stars for a few seconds. But then my vision cleared, and I was treated to a view of Spike’s underside as he stood over me, his chest directly overhead but my eyes pointed down at his belly, where his scales slid unbroken down between his hind legs, and on to the curve of his tail. It was a little bit disappointing, but I suppose he is a baby dragon. At any rate, I had nothing better to do than imagine what he would look like if he was a full-grown dragon, as his teeth dug into my belly and tore off a flap of skin, and a dizzying, sliding sensation washed over me as my organs spilled out down my sides. The jerks and tugs against strange places that I’d never really known existed before made it clear what was going on, even if I hadn’t been able to hear the wet smack and squelching as he slurped up my innards.
Dragons have two penises, right?
Suddenly, my point of view shifted as I was dragged downwards, but then a claw dug into my chest and held me in place as the most intense pressure and tugging yet jerked me back and forth. Several of my ribs gave way before my spine, but then I slid upwards as it finally separated, and then there was a long period of crunching and chewing where I didn’t feel anything at all, because whatever was letting me still feel anything while nothing actually hurt didn’t extend to the parts of my body that had been torn clear away, like Spike had apparently done with my whole lower half.
I got a quick glimpse of what was left of my hindquarters a few seconds later, when he casually spun me around underneath him, trying to get a grip of my remaining foreleg. It was kind of cute, in a sad way – he’d eaten all my internal organs, and most of the meat of my thighs and even the bones and hooves from my lower legs, but he’d left my crotch and rear end completely untouched. There was even half a cutie mark left! It was a bit hard to make out under all the blood, though.
Spike ate my last leg while it was still attached. It was amazing how many times a bone can break before the pieces are small enough for a dragon to swallow, or maybe he was just savoring it, like Twilight had told him to.
“Are you still alive?” he asked, and I blinked twice at him as an answer. I probably wasn’t going to be for much longer – I mean, really, with the amount of blood I’d lost, it hardly made sense. Was it Celestia’s spell, trying desperately to keep me from passing on? I thought of it doing the same thing, uselessly, when a pony was being eaten by a manticore or a timberwolf or something without the benefit of a numbing spell, and – yeah. I was going to have to have words with Celestia too, wasn’t I.
Spike closed his eyes, and puffed out a bit of green fire. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “For what it’s worth, you really are the best I’ve ever eaten.”
Then he leaned down, and his teeth slid through the skin of my neck, and through some crunchier bits inside until they met, then tore away, and everything quickly went black. It was faster than the chloroform had been.
And, well, that’s it. I guess I was dead. I suppose I could make up the part where Spike ate the rest of my corpse, but it’d be a complete fabrication. It’d make more sense to say, I woke up in Twilight’s magic circle, feeling more happy and energetic than I had in months – like I’d been under some sort of veil that had infected every aspect of my life with depression, and it had just been lifted. Yes, I know, I didn’t really feel depressed, and everypony I talked to about it said that I’d seemed perfectly happy the whole time, but it was like… cellophane? Or a low level atonal bass track underneath a melody, which you don’t really register until it cuts out.
Twlight kept calling me ‘Lyra 2.0’, which I thought was silly since the whole ‘replace with a duplicate’ thing clearly hadn’t actually happened in any real sense. I chewed her out for mistreating Spike, and she kind of got really mad and blasted me across the room, snapping my neck. Just kidding! I wasn’t really injured, but it actually hurt, which was kind of a shock, feeling more pain from a little bruise than from having my flesh and bones torn apart by a dragon’s claws.
===
“And, um, yeah. That’s what happened yesterday. Sorry I missed our date, Rose.”
Rose sighed. “That is the worst excuse I have ever heard, Lyra. Don’t you think you should have told a story that didn’t feature me as a previous victim?”
Lyra laughed, and strummed a playful melody on her harp. “Well, I didn’t want you to take it too seriously.”
Rose shook her head, and grabbed a daisy from her display to munch on. “So, really – where were you? Did Bon Bon get cold feet about letting you out of her hooves?”
“Well,” Lyra said, grinning and blushing a little bit as she remembered the previous night. “Spike really does have a lovely tongue…”