Meat and Bone, Sinew and Bile

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The biggest thing I took away from my anatomy classes when I was still a student was that the equine body is incredibly resilient. It can sustain all kinds of injuries, abrasions and lacerations, lose limbs, have its parts disconnected and reconnected, be cut and beat and broken, but come out of it alive and still kicking.

The brain is the perfect example of this. It can rewire itself, reconnect its neurons to function even after great trauma. Entire functions of the brain that are lost can be remapped to other parts of the structure. We call this ‘neuroplasticity’ in the medical world. In the non-medical world, it’s known as ‘a miracle’. Actually, it’s known by that in the medical world, too.

That’s what I took away from my classes in medical school. The equine body, truly, is made of miracles.

The first thing I learned when I actually started working in medicine is that the equine body is also disgustingly fragile. Bones break. Hearts fail. The brain can just… stop working.

Anatomy books don’t teach you this. Not in the way practice does. You learn it from your patients. From the corpses. That’s what came with experience; the knowledge that the body is only the sum of its parts, and those parts are merely flesh and bone.

That’s what the real world taught me.

“Are you sure you want me to do this, Your Highness?” I asked, glancing towards the body under the sheet. “I mean… I hardly feel qualified.”

Princess Twilight Sparkle placed a hoof on my shoulder. The alicorn towered over me, regality personified.

“Don’t worry, Dr. Mortis,” she reassured me. “I have great respect for your skills, and was assured by many that you were the best in your field. I wouldn’t trust this task to anyone of lesser credentials than yours.”

The two of us were in the operating room beside the morgue, down in the depths of Mountain Ascent General Hospital in Canterlot. Buried, as if to be forgotten by all but the few who worked there.

Like myself.

The room was well-lit; the steel tools lined up on the tray beside the mortuary table glinted under the operating lights. It stank of formaldehyde and antiseptic. Familiar smells.

“But… a princess?” I said. “What right do I have—”

“You have every right,” the princess replied. “I have given my permission as ruler of this land, and we have the permission of her family, as well.”

I swallowed.

“You agree with me that this is a once in a millenia opportunity, don’t you?” Twilight Sparkle asked. “An alicorn’s never—”

She paused. Pursed her lips.

“—died, before. This is an invaluable chance to further our understanding of alicorn biology. I, for one, have a vested interest in this, being one myself.”

“Of course, Princess,” I said. “I do agree. It’s just that—”

Twilight Sparkle smiled. “Please, Dr. Mortis, relax. I understand your concerns. But understand, I am asking you to do this, not as a princess, but as a fellow pony of science. If you wish to back out now, however, I understand. The gravity of all of this weighs upon me, too.”

“N-no,” I stammered. “I want to do this. I’m just… a little overwhelmed by the responsibility.”

“Don’t be,” Twilight Sparkle said. “You can do this. I have faith in you.”

“Then I will do my best not to let you down, Your Highness,” I said, managing a slight smile.

“Please,” the Princess said. “Just ‘Twilight’ is enough.”

She paused.

“I do, however, have one concern,” she said. “Are you sure you want to do this alone? I’m sure there are many who would offer you their assistance on a project such as this.”

“I felt it would be unfair to them to ask,” I replied. “I am quite capable of doing this sort of work alone. I usually do.”

“Fair enough,” Twilight said. She smiled another reassuring smile. “Then I will leave this in your capable hooves, Dr. Mortis.”

“Thank you, Princess Twilight.”

With that, she exited the operating room, leaving me alone with the thing under the sheet.

I took a deep breath. I wasn’t used to dealing with royalty. Living or dead.

Time to get to work. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, they were hardened. Focused.

I lit my horn and removed the sheet.

It was an alicorn, laid down on its side upon the mortuary table. An alicorn with a dark blue coat and a crescent moon on her flank.

This had once been Princess Luna.

I had never met the mare in person. But she had spoken to me in a dream, once, when I was a filly. It was a simple nightmare, as most childhood dreams are. I had been bullied, when I was young, for the scalpels that had one day appeared on my flanks. The other foals called me a freak. A butcher. And they had managed to convince me of the same.

Princess Luna had banished those thoughts. She showed me what my talent really meant. That I was destined to help ponies. She told me that my talent would touch the lives of many.

After that night, I never again doubted my purpose in this world.

The pony on the mortuary table, however, was not the mare who had helped me find peace with myself, all those many years ago. This was just meat. Flesh and bone.

Just another cadaver to be dissected.

The body was in good condition, I noted. Nothing appeared outwardly wrong with it. Youthful and trim. One would not have guessed that it had belonged to a pony who was over a thousand years old.

She lay on her side, her legs pointed straight out. Her wings, too, had been extended to their full length away from the body. Her mane was swept to one side, and draped down off the side of the table. It did not move; it was merely light blue hair, now, the same as any other pony’s. Limp. Lifeless. Much like its owner.

There was a second cloth, covering the mare’s head. I removed that as well.

I flinched.

Half of Luna’s face was gone.

No. Not gone. Crumpled inwards.

The skull had fractured. Much of the skin was gone, leaving only angry red muscle and flashes of broken bone. The eye—oh Celestia, the eye—had been punctured, and what remained of it hung out of its crushed socket and down Luna’s face like runny egg. The horn, too, was broken, revealing the severed nerves that ran up its length.

There was no saving the brain. I replaced the cloth. Nothing would be learned from… that.

The exact cause of death had not been told to me. Luna’s death hadn’t even been made public yet, as far as I was aware. I could see why they’d been okay with having Luna dissected; the funeral would never have been open casket.

Enough speculation; back to work. I took up a scalpel from the tray in my magic.

The first thing to do would be to embalm the body, preserve it for later study. This wouldn’t be one night’s work. And the first thing to do there would be to infiltrate the body with formalin. I quickly disinfected the incision site on Luna’s neck.

The scalpel, freshly sharpened, sank easily into her flesh. I drew it downward about three inches, cutting neatly through the skin and muscle. A small amount of blood dripped down the side of the neck and into the drainage holes in the table.

I set my hoof on Luna’s neck. The body was still cold from refrigeration; I could feel it through the plastic tied around my hoof. It was even colder than the rest of the morgue, which itself had to be kept quite cold. Dead bodies didn’t do well at room temperature.

Gently, I pulled back, opening the incision just a little bit. I inserted a pair of locking forceps and clamped them down on the skin, letting the weight hold the cut open.

There was still muscle in the way; I retrieved a pair of curve-tipped scissors and brought them close, slipping one side under the muscle.

Snip. Snip. Snip. The muscle was tough, but it cut easily. I peeled it back.

The jugular vein stood out against the angry red of the meat that surrounded it, being a sort of grey-blue in colour. I shifted it out of the way slightly and found its pair, the carotid artery, itself a pale red.

Very carefully, I separated the two with my magic. They stretched like rubber, but nevertheless they were delicate. In a living pony, rupturing either of these would mean a swift death.

Just as I was about to turn away, I heard something. A sigh, or a wheeze, the sound of air passing through one’s lips. I snapped my head up, expecting to find another pony watching me, but there was no one else in the room.

I glanced back down at the corpse. Could it have…?

I shook my head. Bodies did weird things, sometimes, after they had passed. Probably just some gas escaping. It didn’t matter. Back to work.

Using my magic, I floated over three ligatures, little lengths of surgical string, and slipped them under the tubes, two on the carotid and one on the jugular.

I turned my attention to the embalming machine, sitting atop a cart beside the table. It was a large thing, a metal box with a clear reservoir atop it to hold the embalming fluid. A pressure dial sat upon its surface, along with knobs to control the pump. It was already filled with fluid, mostly formalin; I’d had the assistants mix it up for me ahead of time.

I unfurled the plastic tubing that ran from the base of the machine. Attached to the end was a y-adapter, which split the tube into two. To each end I connected a separate flexible line, and to the ends of those I connected two arterial tubes, long stainless-steel tubes of a thinner diameter.

With a pair of surgical scissors, I made a cut into the carotid artery. I used the backs of the scissors to widen the opening a bit, then brought the two arterial tubes over and inserted one into each side. One facing towards the heart; the other towards the head. I tied the ligatures tightly together around them, closing the artery around the metal.

I took one more tube, this one shorter, and repeated the procedure with the jugular. This tube was left to dangle; it was for drainage.

I looked over my work one last time, even though I knew I didn’t need to. I’d done this enough times.

Nodding to myself, I switched on the machine.

Embalming fluid ran down the tubes and was forced into the body. Almost immediately, blood began to rush out of the drainage tube, a deep crimson, pouring onto the table and running down its length into the drain. The wet gurgling noise it would have made was covered up entirely by the loud mechanical sound of the pump. The fluid would pervade every tissue in the body, preventing decomposition and leaving the specimen preserved for later work.

I watched, adjusting the pressure as needed and using my magic to roll and massage the limbs, until the flow of blood from the drainage tube ceased and only the clear excess formalin flowed from it. I switched the machine off, and silence returned to the room. With great care not to damage the tissues any further, I undid the ligatures and removed the tubes. The embalming process was complete, now; I’d let the body settle a bit and then preliminary dissection would begin.

I would focus on the internal organs first, today, get them out of the body and preserved. Though to be honest, what I was really the most interested in was the wings. They were different in structure than a pegasus’, and I could tell the musculature underneath would be unique as well. This was something new, something that had never been documented before.

That could wait until after I’d finished with the organs, however. In the meantime, I decided I’d take some pictures.

The camera sat atop the countertop against the wall. It was a self-developing polaroid camera designed specifically for medical use. It offered several stages of magnification; I set it to 1x.

Floating it overhead, I aimed it at the cadaver. A pair of lights on the camera shone two beams onto Luna’s barrel, allowing me to properly center it. I pressed the shutter, and the flash briefly illuminated the room.

Snap.

The camera whirred as the picture slid out of the slot on the bottom. I pulled it out with my magic and shook it, letting the picture develop. There on the film was a picture of Luna’s body, from head to tail. Perfect.

I glanced at the cloth over Luna’s head. It was damp, now, on the surface; a light red stain had begun to show through it.

I bit my lip. Might as well, I thought. I lifted the sheet up, once again exposing the wound to the air. It looked wetter, now, from the embalming fluid. Moist.

Alive.

I shook my head, then floated the camera over. I positioned it above the wound, turned the magnification up, and pressed the shutter.

Snap.

Once again, the flash lit the room. The picture slid out of the slot and I retrieved it. I watched as the picture developed.

Or tried to develop.

The sides of the photo were fine; I could see the edges of the table, could see Luna’s mane spilling off out of view. But the area where the head would be remained undeveloped, a dark splotch in the center of the photograph.

My brow creased. Maybe something was wrong with the film? I re-aligned the camera and took another picture.

Snap.

I shook it for a few seconds. Then, I floated it close so that I could inspect it.

I yelped, dropped the photo onto the mortuary table and stumbled back a few feet. I looked at Luna’s head, but it was still, lying on its side as it always had been. Remaining eye closed. Wound facing up.

I could have sworn, in the photo, that she’d been looking right at me.

My heart hammered in my chest, but I quickly calmed myself. I was a professional; I would approach this professionally.

I picked up the photograph off the table and held it up again to the light, but it had been damaged by the wet chemical surface of the table and was unrecognizable.

Maybe that was for the best.

I quickly covered Luna’s head with the cloth again. The body had settled enough, I decided. Time to begin dissection. I set the camera back on the countertop, next to the tape recorder. We usually used this machine for autopsies, not for dissection, but this was a special occasion. Notes would be required. I hit the ‘record’ button with my magic. The machine let out a quiet whirr as the reels began to spin.

I closed my eyes, took in a breath, and let it out. When I reopened them, they were hardened once again.

“Subject is Princess Luna,” I said to the recorder. “Alicorn. Age unknown. Weight…”

I inspected the clipboard that the mortuary assistants had left me.

“…273.6 kilograms. Cause of death not specified. Heavy injury sustained to the cranium, looks like blunt force damage—”

I caught myself. This wasn’t an autopsy; I didn’t have to run through the script, and I didn’t need to speculate on the cause of death. That wasn’t why I was here.

I set the clipboard back down on the countertop. Turning to my tray, I retrieved a scalpel, this one with a blade that came to a sharper point.

“Beginning dissection of the thoracic cavity,” I said aloud. I positioned the blade at the top-right of Luna’s chest. It sank into the flesh, only a few millimeters deep, puncturing through the hide and into the subcutaneous fat.

I drew the scalpel down around Luna’s hind leg, then across, then up again to the base of her neck. The cuts were precise, and the steel did not waver in my grasp.

With a pair of forceps, I took hold of the edge of the cut at the corner by Luna’s hind leg and slid my scalpel underneath, creating a small incision. I peeled the skin back with the forceps, then began to scrape away at the boundary between skin and connective tissue with the scalpel, loosing it from its hold to the rest of the body.

I continued this, working quickly and precisely, diagonally up Luna’s barrel. Each scratch of the blade separated more and more of the hide, the skin peeling back, pulled taut like a stretched cloth. Skinning was an uninteresting job; repetitive, but necessary to get to the more interesting operations of a dissection.

Soon enough, all the skin up to the top of Luna’s back had been pulled away. I reflected it upwards, letting it fold back, away from the working area.

Luna’s muscles were now revealed, beneath a thin layer of connective tissue, which was easily removed. The internal tissues had turned a light grey-white from the lack of blood to colour them.

To work. My scalpel danced along the underside of each layer of muscle, separating one from another. I peeled back each one as I went, exposing more and more of what lay underneath. Soon, the white tracks of the rib cage became apparent.

I ran the blade along the side of each rib, cutting the tissue between them away in strips. I could see glimpses of what lay within the thoracic cavity, little peeks of lung and organ. I repeated the procedure until every rib save the last few were bare.

From the tray, I retrieved a pair of rib shears, stainless steel cutters with one blade that curved to the side and another wide like the blade of a pocket knife. The tip of the curved blade was round and blunt, to prevent tissue damage.

Careful not to catch the shears on anything below, I worked the blades around the first rib. I squeezed the handles; the rib cut with the sound of splintering wood.

Shh-crack.

I moved on to the next one.

Shh-crack.

Soon enough, all the ribs along Luna’s barrel had been removed save the shortest four at the back, which were unobtrusive enough to keep.

I surveyed my work. The ribs had cut cleanly, exposing the cadaver’s thoracic cavity. Luna’s left lung was apparent, roughly the size of my head. The abdominal wall sat behind the last few ribs; it glistened under the lights.

“Thoracic cavity is now open,” I said to the recorder.

Time for more pictures. I picked up the camera, with only the slightest of hesitations, and floated it over. I lifted it to my eye so I could see through the viewfinder. The twin beams of light appeared on Luna’s lung.

I pressed the shutter button.

Snap.

I moved the camera away and watched as the photograph slid out of its base. I bit my lip as the photo developed.

It was just a picture of Luna’s cavity. Nothing out of the ordinary.

I let out a breath, then returned to work. I took a few more pictures—

Snap.

—and then set the camera back down.

“Removing left lung,” I said, picking up my tools again.

The lung could be a little tricky to excise; it was connected to the windpipe by the primary bronchus, as well as the pulmonary artery and veins, all of which were located on the backside of the organ. You also had to be careful not to cut the vagus nerve, which also ran underneath the lung.

This, of course, was old hat for me. I pulled the lung away from the chest and slid my scalpel into the structures underneath. The blade cut through the hilum easily, and shortly the lung was loose. I slipped it out of the chest and walked with it over to the counter, upon which sat a weighing scale. I set it down in the tray.

“Left lung is… six point seven kilograms,” I read off the dial.

I transferred it to a fresh dissection tray. I would wrap it in a plastic bag and store it in the refrigeration room later. For now, it would sit on the counter while I continued my work.

Back to the cadaver. With the lung gone, the pericardial sac was exposed, a membrane of strong connective tissue and serous membrane that covered the heart. A very careful few cuts with the scissors and it became loose; I peeled it back.

The heart was now exposed, a grey mass of muscle. There was the aorta, the pulmonary arteries and veins, as well as the superior vena cava coming out of the top of the heart. The inferior sat below the edge of the cut ribs, out of sight.

“Heart is proportionally larger than that of an adult pony, in line with that of a large earth pony,” I remarked. I’d cut open a few earth ponies in my time, and the sheer size of their hearts had always struck me. It was no wonder that they had the kind of stamina they did.

Time to remove it. I worked my magic with scalpel and scissors, beginning to sever the great vessels. Embalming fluid bubbled out of the vena cava and into the thoracic cavity as the blade slid through it. I moved then to the aorta, and—

Lub-dub.

I stopped. Blinked. Had the heart just—

Lub-dub.

There it went again. The muscles in the heart had contracted, then relaxed.

Lub-dub.

The heart was beating.

I withdrew my scalpel and stared, my expression blank. This was impossible—Luna was dead!

The heart began to beat faster. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Fluid sloshed out of the incisions I’d made with each contraction. Lub-dub. Lub-dub.

My tools clattered against the steel table as my magic fizzled out. Could this be some kind of post-mortem twitch, caused by damage to the brain? No, that could only occur shortly after death, and Luna had been dead for hours.

“Heart is… beating,” I said, partly to the recorder, partly to affirm that this was really happening. I watched, half-terrified, half-fascinated, as the heart continued to pulse.

Lub-dub. Lub-dub.

Lub-dub. Lub—

And then, just as quick as it had started, it stopped.

I held my breath, but the room had fallen silent again, save for the steady whirr of the tape recorder.

A few moments more passed, and when nothing happened, I let out a sigh.

That’s when Luna’s entire body spasmed.

Her legs shot out wildly, and her wings snapped open. She kicked the tray over; tools skidded across the floor. A stray scalpel nicked my hoof, and I cried out in pain.

She continued to twitch. Her neck swung, and the cloth slipped off her face, the wound once again becoming exposed to the open air. Her punctured eye sprayed fluid across my face as her head jutted out at a bad angle. Her skull banged repeatedly against the table, bang, bang, bang, crunch.

I stumbled backwards, away from her. My hoof hit the back wall, and I fell against it, my legs going out from under me and my backside sliding to the floor. I could only watch.

Luna’s skin rumpled and shifted, until something broke through the surface—it took me a moment to realize that they were blood vessels, an entire bare circulatory system, ripping through their own flesh. They emerged from within the cavity, too, dripping embalming fluid, an entire, undamaged net of them. They pulled upwards, the last of them freeing themselves from the meat, and rose into the air above the body.

There was something beautiful about that sight, as the vessels, veins and arteries danced and folded in the air. They formed a shape, but I could not discern what it was. Not at first.

I heard a gurgling sound, then, and watched as blood began pouring up, out of the drain. It rose into the air in a gout of crimson, filling in the space created by the veins, and it was then, confronted by the shape in its entirety, that I discerned what it was making.

It was making the shape of a pony. Young. A filly.

I got to my hooves, the wound on my leg aching. I looked down at it and saw that some of my blood, too, was trickling out into the air and joining that in the body. My attention returned to the cadaver, just in time to watch as the abdominal sac split open, birthing organs and intestines in a shower of wetness into the cold mortuary air. They snaked upwards and joined their fellows. The lung, too, left on its tray, was pulled over and plunged into the red, spattering crimson across the surgical white of the wall.

The heart, still in the chest, strained against its restraining arteries until they tore. The remaining lung followed it. The lights above began to flicker.

And then the meat’s turn came. Luna’s flesh sloughed upwards, more liquid than solid, as if it had putrefied. It slopped and slid into place along the outside of the blood child, not forming actual structures but more of a loose, wet coating. The blood vessels seized it, shot into it like needles and pulled it close.

I could see features, now. A snout, ears. A mouth. It opened, meat and blood dripping between the top and bottom.

And it began to scream.

It was a wet, indiscernible wail that echoed in the small room of the morgue. My ears folded down on their own, trying to escape from it, but the sound was as much in my mind as it was in the air.

But it was a familiar voice. And suddenly, the thing ceased to be meat and blood, and became all at once again the pony from my foalish dreams.

“No!” Luna screamed, for it could only have been her. “Take me back! I want to go back!”

The skin of the cadaver, no longer Luna, tore away from what remained of the muscle in jagged strips, leaving the flesh behind. It, too, floated into the air and began to circle the filly.

“I was everything!” she screamed. “I was the stars, the moon, the sky, the earth! I was in every mountain, every river, every tree, every animal and insect, every pony!”

It knit together in uneven sheets and formed itself around the vague features of Luna’s new vessel.

“I want to go back!” she screamed. “I don’t want to be meat and bone, sinew and bile! I want to be everything!”

Bones snapped. The cadaver’s legs crumpled. Jagged chunks of white tore through the thin remains and joined their brethren.

“I want to be everything again!”

The lights went out. I was left in the darkness, with only Luna’s wails and the sordid sounds of a body stitching itself anew.

I do not know how long I stood there, in the dark. When the lights flickered on again, there was a filly, intact, sitting in what remained of her original body. Light blue coat. Lighter blue mane. Horn and wings. Her hooves were over her eyes, and she was sobbing into them.

And then everything went dark again, not from the lights going out, but from my own consciousness fading. I felt myself crumple to the floor, and then—

When I awoke, the filly Luna was standing over me. I was on the floor; my skull hurt from where it must have impacted the tile.

“Ah, good,” Luna said. “I was worried you weren’t going to wake up.”

I stared at her. She was truly a filly, now, only a couple feet in height.

“Do not be alarmed,” she said. “I apologize for what you may have seen.”

“N-no,” I stammered. “It’s okay.”

I rolled onto my stomach. The motion brought with it a wave of dizziness, and I clutched at my head.

“Are you alright?” Luna asked.

“It’ll pass,” I said.

“You are Livor Mortis, correct?”

I stared. “How did you…?”

“I remember visiting your dreams, many, many moons ago,” Luna said. “I told you your talent would touch many. It seems to have touched me, now, as well.”

“I can’t believe you remember me,” I said.

Luna smiled. “I would not forget one of my subjects.”

“Did you… did you know this would happen?” I asked. “You… coming back, I mean.”

“No,” she said. “I have never died before, nor has any other alicorn. What you have witnessed tonight is as strange to you as it was to me.”

I thought back to what she’d said while being reborn.

“Do you…” I began. “Do you still remember… being dead?”

“The memory is already fading,” Luna said, smiling sadly. “I remember being at peace. A great, all-encompassing state of tranquility. But that is all I remember, and that sensation may leave me soon as well.”

She straightened up.

“Come,” she said. “We must tell Princess Twilight of this. I imagine the others will be very happy to see me alive. I cannot imagine what this must have done to my sister.”

I stood up slowly. The dizziness seemed to have faded.

I cast one last glance at what remained on the mortuary table, but it was gone. There was no evidence of the body that had once occupied it having ever existed there.

Turning, I followed the filly out of the morgue.

The body was fragile. The mind was resilient. The body was resilient. The mind was fragile. Even if the mind was unwilling, the flesh would continue. Even if the flesh gave out, the mind would persist as long as it could.

The mind and the flesh. At odds with each other.

Meat and bone, sinew and bile.