I felt myself floating alone in the dark void of dense nothingness. How had I arrived here? And when? I couldn’t remember! I focused all my being on trying to recall what had happened, but only a vague, and very faint, image came to mind: cold, so much cold… and more darkness… and water. Was it water? I couldn’t tell! And the harder I tried to figure it out, the less sure I became!
Water. Could that explain my current condition? I didn’t think I might have been anywhere near water, but how would I know? Had I gone swimming? Had I transformed into a fish? Had I needed to hide from pursuers and sought shelter under the surface? I checked myself. I couldn’t see anything in the dark, but working on touch alone, I seemed to be in my own form. But if this was water and I was submerged at this very moment, why weren’t my lungs screaming for air? I’d been like this long enough to expect that!
Had I drowned?
Oh dear... I had, hadn’t I? But how, and why?
And how long ago? Wouldn’t anyone miss me? Did I even have anyone who might miss me?
Spike, my mind whispered. But had that been real? Had I really befriended a young dragon, or had it been a mere dream? A hallucination in my dying moments, one sparked by the one thing I’d always wanted in life but was never going to see it happen?
A wave of loneliness like I’d never known before washed over me. Was I doomed to spend the rest of eternity like this, alone in this overwhelming, suffocating darkness? What monstrous atrocity could I have committed to deserve it?
The darkness dissipated gradually. I hadn’t noticed it at first, but after some time - maybe minutes, maybe centuries; I couldn’t tell - I began to perceive the outlines of my hole-riddled forelegs in the surrounding emptiness, barely noticeable at first, but eventually, my whole body was clearly discernible against the gloomy, green background.
And later still, I realized there was a certain… unevenness… in all that green.
Unevenness. Was that even a word? And why did it matter?
After eons spent suspended in place, I decided to try if I could move around.
It seemed to work. There were no visual cues to tell me that - not ones I was conscious of, anyway - but it felt like I was going somewhere!
Until my face hit something.
I recoiled in surprise and shook my head. What had I hit? There was nothing there! I reached out cautiously, and sure enough, my hoof came in contact with something: a wall both soft and hard, a barrier firm but malleable.
Another vague memory stirred in me: I’d seen such a barrier before… and the shade of green surrounding me was, somehow, troublingly familiar.
And suddenly, unmistakably, I knew why.
But before I had time to panic or ask myself how I might have gotten there, a figure materialized out of the darkness on the other side of the translucent barrier. It came closer to me and stared in silence.
I knew that figure too well; I’d known him all my life.
My brother Pharynx.
But why was he standing upright? Shouldn’t he be upside-down? No, shouldn’t I be upside-down? Was he walking on the ceiling? It didn’t feel like it! No, I realized, we were both upright!
I leaned with both forehooves against the wall of this peculiar cocoon that held me.
“Pharynx? Can you let me out?” I said, but no sound came from my mouth.
He kept staring as if nothing had happened.
I leaned closer to him.
“Let me out! Please?” I made an effort to speak louder, but again my words were drowned out.
No change from him, either. He remained immobile, staring at me ominously.
“Pharynx?” I whispered silently.
More figures stepped out of the darkness: changelings, more and more of them, each approaching my cocoon to stare at me. Some of them I knew by name, some I knew by sight, some were completely unfamiliar to me. Some - most, actually - I knew how badly their punches hurt or by how many times they had put me in bandages.
“Um… let me out, guys?” I tried again with the same result as before.
More and more drones arrived by the minute. Some shook their heads at me disapprovingly and left. Most remained standing around me, staring.
At some point, I became aware that the slime in my cocoon was glowing. Why hadn’t it glowed before? It made no sense! I knew by now that I was most definitely alive; the slime should have glowed from my life force all along!
What was happening?
“Let me out, guys! Pharynx!” I screamed silently, banging on the walls of my glowing green prison as panic rose in my heart and more changelings continued to gather up. “Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!”
More changelings. The glow brightening steadily.
“Guys! Please! Let me out!” If I were on the dry, tears would be streaming down my face now.
Tears… water…
Suddenly, all changelings except for one disappeared. Pharynx closed his eyes.
When he opened them, purple eyes stared back at me; not his own, but eyes belonging to another…
Pony eyes… empty, desperate eyes…
Suddenly, there was no Pharynx anymore. In his place, towering over me, stood the mare whose life I’d destroyed, the mare I’d so unforgivably violated in that horrible moment of weakness.
“Why did you do it?” she whispered, and the crushing hopelessness in her voice shook the world to pieces. “Why did you kill my soul while my body is still alive?”
“I’m sorry!” I screamed at the top of my lungs in my green bubble of silence while its intensifying glow threatened to burst my eyes out of existence. “I’m so sorry, so terribly sorry!”
“Murderer!” she bellowed. “Traitor!”
Her eyes turned green, the same sickly green as the impossibly-glowing slime surrounding me; she pranced and spread out her wings, and when she stomped the unseen ground, my cocoon burst open, and her coat came apart in pieces, revealing the black carapace and ragged, translucent wings beneath. The jagged horn fizzled into existence from the surrounding darkness.
I stared breathless at the one being who I knew for sure would go out of her way to show me no mercy for what I’d done.
Before I could move or utter a sound, Queen Chrysalis pounced me, her fangs pierced my chitin, and she ripped my throat out in one vicious jerk.
I snapped my eyes open with a gasp and needed a moment to process the sudden change of scenery. A few torches held the darkness at bay; cold floor of stone lay beneath me in place of the burst cocoon, thick chains that hadn’t been there before were tangled around my forelegs and extended to wrap around the rest of my body, and imposing bars in front of me separated me from a duo of armor-clad ponies staring at me with peculiar expressions on their faces.
Right. Prison.
The guard that I hadn’t met before turned to the one who had been there earlier and opened his mouth as if to say something, but before he could utter a sound, they both turned to the echo of hoofsteps coming down the stairs. Soon enough, the newcomer was in my sight. It was the last pony I’d expected to see, though I realized now that her presence here made perfect sense.
“How is he?” Princess Cadance asked the guards. Was there… concern in her voice?
“He hasn’t attempted to break out, Your Highness,” one of them told her, “though he has been acting… weird, if I may say so.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s been sulking on the floor all night, and… well, crying a lot… if I didn’t know better, I’d think he was genuinely sorry for the things he’d done… He fell asleep close to dawn and wouldn’t stop tossing and turning and muttering things until he woke up just before you arrived. I can’t explain it, Princess, but it felt like I was watching one of his victims, not the monster who attacked them.”
“Half the cell block noticed, too,” the other guard added.
I noticed then that a pony in the cell opposite mine, probably the one who had been snoring earlier, was now wide awake, watching us. Another, partly hidden from my sight by the wall of my cell, was craning his neck to see who they were talking about.
The Princess approached the bars of my cell and lit up her horn. I flinched, expecting another painful blast, but her spell hit the bars instead.
“Unlock the cell,” she told the guards.
“Princess?” they asked.
“Unlock the cell, I said. Or give me the key and I’ll unlock it myself.”
The guards shared a hesitant glance, then one of them relented and fetched a key from somewhere out of my sight and did as ordered.
“Thank you,” Cadance said, then entered the cell and sat down in front of me.
I cowered on the ground.
“Have.. have you… come to deliver my… my punishment?” I asked with a voice so feeble and quivering that it was a miracle that I’d managed to utter a sentence anypony could understand.
“No, Thorax, I’m here to release you.”
Release me? After everything I’d done?! Surely she was mocking me! But why was there no hint of malice in her voice and no trace of fury in her eyes?
“Why?” I dared to ask.
“Because there’s no need to keep you here.”
“But I attacked and violated a pony, and that’s just counting what I did after leaving the hive! I can’t even begin to count how many I fed on throughout my life before I escaped! How is there no need to punish me for something as horrible as that? I’m sure Prince Shining would have told you everything by now! I don’t deserve mercy after what I did!”
“Yes, Shining told me about the incident, and my first instinct was to agree with him about locking you up. But then I remembered what I’d seen of you and your behavior over the past couple of days since you revealed yourself to us, and about everything Spike said about you, and I tried to put myself in your position based on everything I know about you so far. And you know what? I came to realize that the things why Shining put you here, the things you blame yourself for, aren’t really your fault; you did them not because you wanted to, but because you had no other choice! I’m sure that goes for the ponies you fed on while still living in the hive, too!”
“But that still doesn’t justify draining a pony after I left the hive! I should have known better, I should have controlled myself better! And if I had failed at that, the least I should have done was to try to help her… either that, or to surrender myself right away, not wait for months until somepony had to draw that confession out of me! I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Princess, but I really don’t deserve to be spared!”
“And that is exactly why I’m setting you free,” she said with a warm smile.
“I don’t understand…”
“Remember that cave you were hiding in? Spike said you’d piled up every rock and crystal you could find onto the only exit you knew of. Why?”
“To keep the Royal Guards from finding me… and later, to make it as hard as possible for me to get out and assault another pony if I were to have another fit of madness.”
She nodded. “You buried yourself in for the sake of ponies, even if it meant starving yourself to death.”
“Yes, but what does that have to do with not punishing me?”
“It has everything to do with it! Don’t you see, Thorax? In any other circumstances, I wouldn’t have hesitated to support my husband’s decision to punish you for what you did, but I refuse to let him do it now because you’ve already exacted a much worse punishment on yourself than anything we would have come up with, and you did it for all the reasons why ponies might resort to exacting some form of punishment on offenders, without needing to be told to!”
“If you say so… but that pony would probably want revenge if she’s still alive, wouldn’t she?”
“She might, yes. But ponies don’t hold the desire for revenge in high regard, and if she is feeling vindictive, I bet she’s trying to rein it in. I don’t know how things are in your hive - based on your confusion and what I’ve seen of Chrysalis, I think it’s safe to assume that revenge would be a high priority there - but ponies are different. We don’t punish to avenge ourselves or others; to us, it’s much more important and constructive to have the offending individual realize their mistakes and to help them overcome whatever caused them to do what they did, so they would no longer feel the need to do harmful things. Actual punishment in the sense you see it, though unavoidable sometimes, is a last resort that only comes to play when all other ideas have been exhausted, and putting the offender in jail is often either a temporary solution until a proper approach can be found, or a safety measure if the offender is violent. But we never kill them like I get the impression you expect me to do with you; that would only rob the individuals of the chance to find good in themselves, to enjoy the rest of their lives, and to contribute to society.”
I considered this.
“I think I see your point,” I admitted. “But it can’t be denied that the thing that landed me here was an act of violence. How can you be so sure that I won’t repeat it?”
“Because you have friends now,” she reassured me. “You have ponies who are willing to share their love with you and keep you fed, and the thing that pushed you into madness, as you put it, won’t be there anymore! An even more important point in your favor is that you already were in a position to repeat it and went above and beyond to not let it get there!”
“How do you know nothing else would cause me to act out? Something even I would fail to predict?”
“If that were the case, don’t you think I’d have to put every single one of my subject in prison because they might one day do something they shouldn’t do for no apparent reason? I’d probably have to lock myself up, too! But I trust them not to do such a thing, and I trust their friends and families to recognize any warning signs and provide help before it’s too late, and so far, I haven’t been disappointed. And for reasons I told you already, I know I can trust you in the same way.”
“What about all these other ponies?” I gestured to the other cells.
She chuckled.
“They just had a little too much cider and started a fight! But I see them spending time together all the time; they’re friends, and they’ll be apologizing profusely to one another as soon as they sober up, I promise you that! None of them were seriously injured, nothing was damaged beyond repair, and none of them will hold a grudge!”
I couldn’t help but chuckle a little myself. “If you say so, Princess…”
“I’ve seen such things many times in the past, you know,” she winked. “Now, will you stand up and let me get you out of those chains?”