//------------------------------// // Obsidian // Story: Alienation // by Longtooth //------------------------------// Canterlot is an old city. Not the oldest, not even in the top ten, but old. It’s also a city with a strictly limited space in which to grow and a lot of difficulties in getting materials suitable for construction. That means that a lot of Canterlot is built on top of and out of, well, Canterlot. There are a lot of things that result from this, and the building I had entered was one of them. It was made of a hodge-podge of different buildings that had been renovated, partially destroyed, connected and just generally incorporated into each other to create a single structure. Twilight had spent most of her life in the carefully designed and maintained environs of the palace and the university, and even her parent’s home had been mostly a single construction, so this was my first real experience of true Canterlot interiors. The result was… disturbing. Especially with the bubble still fizzing along the edges of my perceptions, making things like strange textures and odd angles pop out and demand attention. The main hall ran directly through the building with the walls showing a strange amalgam of interior wood paneling and exterior brickwork until it terminated at what was clearly meant to be the front door for a house of yesteryear. Doors were set into the wall at uneven intervals, their styles and settings wildly different. Some needed steps to reach them, others were flush with the floor. A few were actually off-kilter, the result of a settling building that hadn’t been corrected when it had been folded into the new construction. The floor itself wasn’t even. Every other hoofstep was at a different height than before, the ground rolling and twisting deceptively, each new dip hidden by the poor lighting. I stumbled. Of course I did. I tripped and shuffled my way down the hall to the stairs the thug at the door had indicated to me. Those, at least, had been crafted all at once and made to work together. I was glad when I had them under me. Yet even though they weren’t the crazy mixture of the rest of the building, they were still old and in ill-repair. They creaked threateningly under my weight, but I ignored the sound, figuring that if heavy stallions could use them with relative frequency, then a slight mare like myself wouldn’t have any problems. The second floor was much like the first, but I could hear things through these walls. The sounds were… strange to me then. I recognized music, much like what had been playing at the Rainbow Junction. A heavy, fast beat and jarring, jangling noise to serve as melody. My head bobbed along with it as I passed, my thoughts flashing to the dance floor and the dark-magic-tainted kiss. I also heard other things from beyond the wall. Laughter, groaning, the sounds of exertion and the low, mewling moans of pleasure from dozens of throats. Twilight may have lived a sheltered life, but she, and therefore I, was not innocent of the concept of sex. She’d been a teenager, just like everypony else. A bookish, shut in, neurotic teenager, but that doesn’t stop the hormones from working. She’d suppressed her desires by focusing on magic and studies, just like she had with everything else, but she was by no means successful in eliminating them. There was a phase she went through where she learned everything there was to know about equine sexuality… discreetly, of course. With a creative and obsessive mind like hers, you can probably imagine how… interesting some of her fantasies got. So I knew exactly what those sounds meant, and it was the first time I began to realize exactly what kind of place I had bullied my way into. The realization wasn’t alarming, sadly. No, just the opposite. I found the idea… exciting. I rounded the entrance to the second staircase when a thin blue unicorn stallion moved out of the shadows to block my path. I stopped and regarded him as he did the same to me. I could see something in his eyes, a kind of hunger that struck me as both dangerous and familiar. There was lust there, yes, undisguised, displayed brazenly, in fact. He licked his lips as his gaze traveled the curve of my hip, his leer only getting wider as I failed to react to him. “Pretty thing,” he said. His voice was barely a whisper, almost lost in the muffled pounding of music through the walls. “I’ll give you a hit for a chance at lifting that tail.” The presumption was amusing, so I laughed. The reaction was instant and shocking. He snarled in rage, lashing out at me with magic and lunging for me physically. The magic I blocked on reflex, but I was unprepared for the assault and he bowled into me. I tried to get away, but he was fast, and despite being thin enough that I could see his ribs standing clear through his coat he moved with incredible strength. He threw me to the floor, my horn bouncing painfully off the edge of the stairs. He was on top of me in an instant, breath hot in my face. “You will be mine,” he hissed. “You will give me what I want.” I bucked and he was tossed away, his emaciated body too light to really hold me down. We both scrambled to our hooves, our horns lighting with our magic. Despite the suddenness of the attack and his clearly vile intentions, I wasn’t afraid. It might have been the bubble keeping me buoyed, but I like to believe that it was a natural reaction. I have certainly faced danger since and found myself relishing the experience. Fear itself is not foreign to me, but fear of combat, of violence? No, I don’t fear these things. I lashed out before he could, wrapping him in telekinetic power and lifting him into the air, twisting the power so that he was held with limbs splayed out and strained. “Sorry,” I said, smirking in victory. “You’re not my type.” He snarled a curse at me, his horn lighting up and trying to break my hold. It was useless. “You dog-faced bitch!” he growled, still not raising his voice to a normal speech volume. I wondered if his vocal cords were damaged. “Let go. Let go! You should be bowing to me you dull slut! Worshipping me!” I blinked in confused surprise as his rant continued. Delusions of grandeur were one thing, but to carry on like that when I had him bound as securely as I did? It was a puzzle, but not one I cared to work out right then. I teleported him to just outside the front door, where I later learned he was promptly arrested by a group of surprised Guards who were just about to bash down the door. My way once again clear I walked up to the third floor. This was where I stepped into something I really didn’t recognize. There were mares and stallions sitting or lying against the wall all the way along the third floor hallway. Enough of them that I had to pick my way carefully through the tangle of their limbs. A pair rutted openly, but quietly, near the stairs, their fierce grins were identical and hardly equine, almost bloodthirsty. The ponies were in a variety of states of health, but many of them looked like the stallion I had just dealt with: emaciated and with a feverish hunger gleaming in their eyes. They all looked at me with a need that went beyond the sexual. It was almost dreamlike, walking among them. They reached out for me, mares and stallions both. Not with the violence of the stallion from before, but with the same possessiveness. They touched me, and there were so many that if I shied away from one, I just pressed myself into another. Their pawing hooves were not gentle, but not hard enough to bruise either. I was afraid for a moment that they were going to swarm me, but it seemed like the touch was all they wanted and after they had done so they went back to sitting or lying on the floor. Their eyes still followed me, though, dragging at me with their desire, clawing at my confidence. I searched the mismatched doors for number fourteen, and found it a ways down the hall. I made slow, uncomfortable walk to the door and tried to ignore the constant feel of hooves dragging themselves over me. Some of them were trying to touch me in… very inappropriate places. I managed to stop them from going that far, but it wasn’t easy. I didn’t want to teleport to the door, not knowing what might set them off into violence. Due to my experience at Heather’s and being on drugs myself, I was acutely aware of how quickly moods can shift when intoxicated. The door to room fourteen was slightly ajar. Enough that I could see some of the interior before opening it. There were more ponies inside, splayed about much like the ones out in the hall. A soft yellow glow lit the room beyond, too diffused to be an electric light, not bright enough to be a standard magic one. I was put in mind of the fairy lights used at festivals and sometimes in ponyville. I opened the door and walked into the apartments beyond. The first room was probably meant to be a living room or foyer, but had been stripped of furniture some time ago. The floor and walls were stained with the grime of years of neglect. Mold covered the ceiling and parts of the walls, adding a musty odor to the scent of sweat and urine and blood that permeated the air. A pair of mattresses had been pushed up against two walls, each host to at least three ponies who were engaged in sexual foreplay that was violent in its intensity. One of the mares, lying on her back and being alternatively fought over and serviced by a pair of quietly snarling stallions, looked up at me and met my eyes. A smile spread across her face, similar to the vicious grins that I had seen in the hall. She reached out one hoof and beckoned to me. Her eyes sparkled with… something. Magic, yes, but nothing I could identify at the time. I was three steps closer to her before I realized I was even moving. I shook off the effect and stopped in my tracks, but I could still feel the pull of her, a sudden urge to join the stallions in fighting over a piece of her, an urge to satisfy her need. I stared at her in horror for a long moment before she was distracted by the ministrations of one of her suitors and the magic was directed back to them. It wasn’t the invasion of my mind that horrified me, not what she had wanted to do to me. I… Twilight Sparkle has faced worse violation and overcome it. No, what truly shocked me was the fact that she was an earth pony. I shuddered, trying to throw off the creeping wrongness of what I was seeing. I managed to remember my purpose there and walked past the carnal scene and to one of the bedrooms. My target sat in the middle of the room, sobbing quietly and whispering things to herself. There were four other ponies in the room, but they all seemed asleep. I stepped into the room, not being particularly quiet, but she didn’t notice anyways. “Not enough,” she was whispering between hitched breaths. She wrapped her forelegs around herself, hugging tightly and rocking slightly back and forth. “Not enough. No. No. Not more. Can’t have more. Too much. Not enough. Eyes in the black and cold blood. Need it. No. Not enough, but too much already.” “Why?” I asked her. She whipped around, moving with startling suddenness. She stared at me, her eyes wide and dilated all the way out so her irises were barely visible as a halo around the black pits of her pupils. “You,” she said. “You hate me.” The statement was so non sequitur that I was caught dumbfounded for a moment. Which she apparently took as acknowledgement. “Of course, of course you hate me. Of course you do. Not good enough. Never good enough. Not enough. Not enough tonight. Need more.” She dipped her head, squeezing her eyes shut and sobbing again. “Too much. Too much.” “I don’t hate you,” I said, sitting down next to her. I saw that her forelegs weren’t just wrapped around her barrel, there was something she was hugging to herself. A package made out of black paper, I could see a slash of colour, a red emblem of some kind, embossed onto it. “You don’t?” she asked, her voice small, childlike. “But you pushed me… I thought…” “I was surprised,” I assured her. As different as I am from Twilight I am not devoid of the compassion that she held in her heart, and what I was seeing then was a mare in desperate need of a measure of kindness. “I don’t hate you.” She set the package down gingerly, as if afraid it would shatter like brittle glass, and reached up to touch my face. I let her, unsure if letting discomfort show would convince her once again that she was hated. She stared into my eyes, and I saw glimmers of magic move through the depths of her pupils. “I knew you were strong,” she said. A change rolled over her, her entire demeanor shifting in a shudder that reminded me of the ecstatic throes of the writhing orgies in the outer room. A smile appeared on her face. No, not a smile. Smiles have good connotations. This was a sneer, dripping with malice and arrogance. “I could taste the power in you. You deserve a place at the top, too.” Her voice had deepened, becoming confident, strong. She reached down and gently opened the package to reveal a fine powder of glinting black crystals. They looked like crushed obsidian, reflecting the pale light coming through the window from mirror-like facets. “What…?” I began, but her hoof came up to my face again, shutting my mouth with a painful click of teeth snapping together. “I will share this with you,” she said, her voice soft and enticing. Seductive. “Give you the heights you crave, the will you need to take what you desire most.” Her hoof traced down my jawline to my neck, running along a pulsing vein to brush over my collarbone and finally come to a stop on my chest, laid over my heart. “I can sense the power in you, and the need.” I found it hard to swallow, my mouth suddenly very dry. There was something terribly wrong here, I knew, something at work more than simple drugs. There had been magic in her kiss before and I saw it now in her eyes. Magic she was directing at me. The tug of that power was strong, and I didn’t have any defenses set for it, hadn’t even considered the need for them. Twilight could have fought it off. Her mind was disciplined and very strong, the only danger to it came from within. I was already compromised with trying to discover who I was, I’m not sure I would have been able to fight it off even if I did have defenses ready. So I was suddenly very hot and very, very attracted to the mare in front of me. “Yes,” she said, drawing out the word into a serpentine hiss. “You’ve tasted it before, but don’t remember the rush.” “I don’t…” I said, shaking my head in a failed attempt to clear it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Her sneer ratcheted up a notch. “Shh. Don’t talk. Don’t try to rationalize or logic your way through it. Feel. Feel it in you. Feel the pounding of your heart and the heat in your skin. Hear the rush of your blood in your ears. Breathe, and you can smell your desire in the air. You can taste it.” I couldn’t help but do as she said. My heart was racing like I had just sprinted a mile, my legs shaking with the intensity of the feelings hitting me. The damn bubble was still giving everything an extra edge, sharpening the sensations that the mare was feeding me. She dipped her head down, and in a slow gesture that was somehow lewd in its presentation, she licked up half of the crystals. When she raised her head to me again her eyes were emitting streamers of shadow, magic burning in her so strong as to leak out. Twilight had seen the effect before. “Your turn,” she said, her whispered voice promising pleasure and violence in equal measure. I had a flash of how the rest of this night could go, and it looked a lot like the orgies on the filthy mattresses in the first room. Me and this mare entwined together, using the magic imparted by the crystals to entice others to join us. One? Two? A dozen? I had so few limits already, magically speaking, there was no telling what I would do. That thought, on its own, was enough to cut through the haze of sex and magic and bring me back to a measure of control. I stared at the crystals left on the open package. I could feel the magic crackling from the mare, more power by far than she should have been able to use. Dangerous magic, it could burn you out. I could only imagine that most if not all of the ponies on this floor had been exposed to it. I didn’t want to end up like them. The mare seized my face between her hooves, dragging my eyes up roughly until they met hers. “Do not disappoint me,” she snarled. Like the stallion downstairs her anger was not accompanied by a rise in volume, only in intensity. “You have the chance to become a creature of power! Do not set yourself among the weak herd that surrounds you. You are above them! Greater!” She shoved my head down until she was almost rubbing my nose in the crystals. “Take it. Share in my glory.” I might have. I honestly don’t know. I had gained some will back, but would it have been enough? I… I want to believe I would have fought back, would have escaped the trap somehow. I like to think that, but if I’m going to be honest with myself, and you, then I have to say that I probably would have licked up those crystals. Knowing what I know now about them, that would have had terrible consequences. More terrible by far than what actually happened, and I have regrets enough about that as it is. ...No, I’m okay. I can continue. I’m just trying to think of how to tell you what happened next. It wasn’t… agh! I don’t want to sugarcoat it, but I feel like I have to make excuses, like I have to justify what I did. There is no justification. There isn’t. I… I crossed a line. I… This is so hard. I didn’t think it would be, but it is. I guess, of all the terrible things I’ve done, this is… not the worst. No. But the first. The point where things truly changed for me. Withdrawing from Twilight’s friends, lying to everypony, drinking, and drugs? Nothing compared to this. And yet, the worst part? I’m not ashamed. I regret it, but that’s because it was unnecessary. It was wrong, deeply wrong, but I don’t feel bad about it. I was there, poised above the black crystal, when the Guard raid reached the third floor. They had been going up through the building, floor by floor, using magic to muffle the sounds of their attack so that the upper floors weren’t alerted until they were already there. The Guard knew that there were illegal substances being sold in the building, not to mention the illicit sex trade and other nefarious deeds taking place that I didn’t even notice, but they were unprepared for the sudden violence the addicts on the third floor were capable of. The noise outside became a series of blasts and shouts as magic and muscle contended with a hallway-full of ponies charged with dark magic. My head rose as the mare’s hooves lost their grip. She sat, staring at the door, and I felt the grip of the magic fade, letting me come back to my senses. I panted, sweating heavily and shaking from the power of the emotions I had been filled with. I could barely move, let alone try to get away. The door burst open and three Guards rushed in, two pegasi and a unicorn. The crystal-empowered mare bared her teeth in a vicious snarl, and I saw that her teeth had grown points, becoming brutal weapons. She lunged at the Guards and they began to fight. The violence roused the other ponies who had been asleep, and they joined the fray almost as soon as their eyes had opened. I dragged myself away from the center of the room, trying to keep free of the fight. It was chaotic, blurs of motion and screams that left me confused. My heart was still pounding so hard it felt like it was going to burst, and the rest of me felt like I had suddenly been left out in a blizzard, cold and pelted all over with stinging sleet. I can’t tell you who was winning the fight. I wish I could give you a better idea of how it went, but I was so distracted by everything I was feeling that I didn’t, couldn’t pay attention to it. All I know is that at some point the addicts got the better of the guards in the room, and the unicorn was thrown into me. He landed heavily, the weight of his body and armor crushing the breath out of me. I reacted on instinct and teleported. He was too close, and I was too distracted to discriminate, so I took us both. We appeared in an alley a block and a half away, dropping ten feet to hit the cobblestones hard. I rolled with the impact, able to soften the landing, but the Guard broke a leg as he fell. He took the injury well, barely crying out, quickly moving into a position that wouldn’t aggravate the break. I was in worse shape, emotionally at least, and scrambled to put my back against a wall, panting heavily. We stayed like that for a long time. Minutes, maybe? My sense of time isn’t as good as Twilight’s, and this was… not a good moment for me in any case. Finally I calmed enough to stagger to my hooves and take note of my surroundings. I could hear the battle going on in the building we had escaped. It sounded horrible. I learned later that it actually went fairly well for the Guards, but that they were unprepared for the viciousness of the black crystal addicts, and so many of them managed to escape. The unicorn Guard I had taken with me was staring at me, anger making his face red. I turned to him, and he spat at my hooves. “What?” I asked, surprised. “You… I expected better of you,” he said, shaking his head. I stepped closer and got a better look at him. There was disgust in his eyes, as well as betrayal and disillusionment on a vast scale. “But there you were, the best of us, with them.” He turned his head away, refusing to look at me any more. “You make me sick.” The realization hit me hard. “You know who I am,” I said. “Of course I know, Twilight,” he said, and I could see sadness creeping through the anger. “I never would have thought… you were such a sweet filly…” Another shake of his head. “The Princess is going to be so disappointed.” The Princess. He was going to tell her. She would investigate, of course. She would look deeper into my behavior, into the events of the past few days. She would ask the right questions, use the right magic eventually, I knew. She would find out. She would know. She would kill me to get her student back. Maybe it was the drugs, maybe it was the lateness of the hour and maybe it was the emotional rollercoaster I had just gone through, but that thought suddenly was all I could focus on. Celestia would find out I wasn’t Twilight, and she would kill me to bring her student back. I couldn’t allow that. I reached out with my magic, wrapping it around the Guard. He noticed what I was doing, his own horn igniting with sapphire light as he tried to counter me. So futile. He didn’t think I would do anything drastic, probably expected me to hold him so I could run. Maybe I should have. I didn’t. I twisted my magic, and he twisted with it. Then, with an ease that still shocks me every time I think of it, I snapped his neck.