((Prompt: How ponies spend the day after Winter Wrap Up.))
Just don't look at it. Rarity cleared her throat and kept her eyes glued to her work. With winter all wrapped up, ponies would be needing new fashions for spring, and she needed to be hard at work readying her new line. The first week after Winter Wrap Up was always one of the busiest times at Carousel Boutique, and Rarity had to be prepared.
But her eyes continued to be drawn inexorably to that one shadowy corner in the workroom. Once it had become clear that the thing was a lost cause, Rarity had hidden it in her boutique to protect the public's eyes from it. But unfortunately, that did little to protect herself.
There it was. Even from across the room, it exuded an aura of wrongness. Its very existence was a cruel mockery of everything it had originally been intended to be. Foul, twisted shapes and impossible angles huddled in a brooding cluster there on the shelf where she had hidden it.
Rarity forced herself to focus on her work, and muttered a mild curse. In her distraction, she had sewn a lime green skirt onto what had been intended to be a lavender cape. The result was unsightly. She clicked her tongue and retrieved her seam-ripper from the desk drawer. That... monstrosity was spreading its ugliness like a tangible thing.
Stop thinking about it. She had her spring fashions to worry about. Never mind that unholy thing in the corner. If she didn't think about it, it couldn't harm her.
She let out a sharp huff. Who was she fooling? There was no way she could just ignore it. The thing was right there, jeering at every principle of good taste and design that Rarity held dear to her heart. She gave up on the cape... dress... whatever it was now, and stomped furiously over to the other side of her workroom.
The abomination was bathed in a blue glow as she lifted it from its place. Little bits of dry grass fell out of it with the motion. Rarity scowled at the thing, as though she could shame it into looking better.
“Why didn't I just get rid of it?” she pondered aloud as she turned it around in the air. She did not wish to think any ill of her dear friend Twilight, but she had trouble believing that anything short of a truly troubled mind was capable of producing this twisted mockery of a bird's nest. Twigs, grass and ribbons intersected each other with an irrational geometry. It could make a pony go mad trying to figure just how the different parts were woven together.
Don't try to fix it, she warned herself. She had spent far too much time the previous day thinking that the very next twig she moved would be the solution, that the labyrinthine snarl would unravel if she only pulled on this one string.
Still it taunted her. Rarity could see a ribbon hanging loose from the edge. 'Tug on me,' it called to her, 'I am surely the key to restoring order to the whole nest!'
Rarity would not be fooled again. There was no such thing as fixing it. At this point, she suspected that even if she threw it in her fireplace and burned it, the ashes would still remain obstinately tied together in a convoluted mess. It was a force beyond her power; the nest that could never be made whole.
Growling absently, Rarity set the nest back down on the shelf. She backed away slowly, keeping her eye on it as though it were a wild predator looking for an opening to pounce on her. She felt her way back to the sewing desk and picked up her needle. She had her spring fashion line to attend to. And an ugly green and purple dress/cape to make.
Her ear twitched. The needle dipped in and out of the fabric. Her eyelid fluttered. The fabric dragged across the table. She smacked her lips. The nest sat there, unmoving.
Rarity's resolve finally snapped. With a feral cry, she lunged at the abomination, tearing grass and ribbons apart. The thing squirmed beneath her hooves, as though it were laughing in victory.
“Twilight, dear,” she sobbed as she struggled desperately with the unsightly knot. “How? How did you do this?”