"... He will be sorely missed by those who loved him and worked beside him..."
It was a somber affair in the Crystal Empire. For the first time in decades, the skies above the radiant palace grounds sat heavy with dark, grey clouds. Princess Cadence wept freely among her citizens, swathed in weighty blacks.
They had done the best they could with him, but the makeup lay caked on thick and pasty, and his wrinkles were still showing strongly. His jaw still jutted razor-sharp and bony from his thin, greying neck, and his mane, combed delicately away from his whorled, scarred horn, looked brittle and waxy in the dim light.
Twilight's wing rested against her side in quiet support, and although Cadence could feel he anguish rolling off of her in waves, she never flinched, never let a tear fall, never took her eyes off her brother's stately corpse.
"... So with great sorrow and regret, we commend his body to the Earth," the speaker finished. The pallbearer a stepped forward with hammer and nails, and with a sudden, jarring whump, the casket shut for the last time.
Something broke in Cadence's chest, and her stomach fell in a free-fall panic. The ground was too much; the sadness around her rose up in a wave and threatened to overtake her. Misery bore her up into the sky as she flew, panicked and hollow and strange. And in a moment she could feel it all- the cold hearts of those below her, the mistrust and the anger and the sadness, the overwhelming sadness.
It lay there for the taiking, rich and heady on the air. And she breathed deep of it, drank her fill of it. And Cadence took a deep, gasping breath and became. Snow fell around her as she winged in an arc. Her subjects screamed and ran and panicked below her, and she cried with the wind. She wailed and whinnied and revelled in her storm, as the misery and distrust around her grew and grew.