The sound of ice fracturing brought her focus back to the present. It had been so dark and so cold that she hadn't even realized when she had stopped paying attention.
At least while tumbling the view had changed but, when she had inexplicably come to rest, things had grown so still there wasn't anything to hold her focus. Floating frozen in the endless night of space left very little to attend to.
But the ice, the sound of it cracking.... that caught her attention. It was a visceral thing, sharp and yet soft. Quiet enough that it was more felt than rightly heard, but by comparison to the the absolute silence she had been subjected to, it seemed as the breaking of the world.
Well.... of another world.
The lances of pain began to wake her frozen nerves. Tiny slivers of ice stabbing and cutting away precious bits as the glaze shattered and flaked into the dark in a slowly expanding cloud of glistening mirrors. The burning of alien magic began to wash over her frozen skin, peeling away 'not-body' from 'body' as surely as any surgeon's scalpel. Even through the numbness of dead flesh, she could feel the spread of the burning grasp of the spell.
Faintly, in the silvery cloud of tiny chips of ice and frozen flesh, her own ghostly visage reflected back on her in the golden light of the spell.
Silently, she screamed.
Her lungs hadn't functioned in years anyway.
-~oOo~-
"Sister, whatever you are doing, you are bringing more agony than aid. Relent and we shall carry your burden," Luna declared with a quick glance to Celestia.
Twilight swallowed as she felt a growing weight seem to sluice off the spellform hovering between them, great arcs of phantom light spilling from the slowly rotating shape as the three Princesses struggled to maintain the unraveling weave of arcane power.
She knew that the Princesses... the actual Princesses... had been doing most of the work. She knew that it was mostly a gesture to help her feel included, but just how much help Celestia had been giving suddenly seemed unbelievably overwhelming. Gram after gram, kilo after kilo, stone after stone the draw upon her magic increased; the weight always bearing down and slowly wearing away at her will to maintain the complex spell from shear exhaustion.
She had known that she was a princess only in name before today, but the effortless ease with which Celestia and Luna had both borne the ponderous spell only drove home just how insignificant her own contribution was.
"Twilight Sparkle! Focus!" came the whip-like command of Princess Luna. "Without our sister's volume of magic, we cannot hope to succeed if your attention waivers. We- I cannot carry this craft alone."
Alone? Why wou-... right.... Element of Magic. Of course. Celestia and Luna were both ancient before ponies even roamed the land... of course they were strong, but strength means nothing without will, talent, skill, or attention to detail. Where Celestia maintained raw power and patience, Luna was a mistress of finesse and respite. While both were absurdly powerful, their talents complimented one another, and without Celestia's half Luna would be at a significant disadvantage.
Luna was relying on her to fill in for Celestia?!?!? No no no no nononononononono!
Wait! Don't lose focus!
Celestia wouldn't have asked if she hadn't been sure I could handle this...
Twilight Sparkle, Princess of.... something.... redoubled her efforts and dug in as she felt her horn begin to heat from the effort.
-~oOo~-
The sky was burning. Darkness and silence were being torn away in an unholy inferno of suffering and senseless experience.
She could feel her skin smoldering as it flecked away - tiny charred cinders wafting off in the delicious fever dreams of some eldritch beast intent on consuming her in the slowest manner possible. Her exposed elbows and ribs shimmered with emberglow as the heat continued to splinter the necrotic bone, further chipping away at her sanity. Her mace, a constant and comforting presence for years, having endured and carried her through countless battles and saving thousands of lives, had become a seething mass of agony as it warped from the preternatural heat and deformed in the deathgrip of her burning hands.
What was left of her spine arched as the last of her icy coffin splintered off into the darkness, its frigid balm suddenly unable to dull what little of her body had been spared the horror of the living fire that even now crept across her exposed spine and sought out the ragged bits of her entrails that served as a reminder of her missing lower half.
Her scream, silent in the depths of space, suddenly exploded into the virgin air of a chamber, ravaging and ripping at the ears of those three who looked on in horror as she fell the half meter to the blissfully cold stone floor - a smoking, smoldering, shuddering mass of gore and wasted flesh, as acrid smoke clawed towards the ceiling as if a thing alive.
A moment later, a twisted lump of white hot metal lodged itself firmly into her ribcage, having twisted the crumbled remains of her fingers free. It's horrid mass crumpled the blackened bone as if it were cray paper. The handle, still aglow with what remained of the leather grip, slammed down into the gaping cavern of her abdomen, forcing the smoking twists of her intestines to unravel as they squirmed free of their fleshy prison before igniting from contact with the near-molten metal.
No. Her lungs hadn't functioned in nearly a decade, but that had never stopped the Forsaken from speaking. The magics that bound them took their orders from something other than the flesh - which was good, considering how precious little she had left.
-~oOo~-
The scream that split the air destroyed the tenuous hold Twilight Sparkle had been struggling to maintain since taking over for Princess Celestia. It was as unequine a sound as had ever been uttered in the fair lands of Equestria, a sound which would flay flesh from bone and left nightmare echos howling from parts of the mind that no pony should ever have reason to explore.
It was the sound of pure, unmitigated, suffering.
Momentarily frozen, her mind valiantly fighting back the rictus of horror, Twilight's last remaining grasp on the spellform slipped.
Celestia's mouth started the first hints of a warning shout while Luna's eyes clenched tighter in the backlash of arcane forces. A burning thing, for there was no better word, seemed to almost squirm into the room from a tiny point of golden light in a portion of the failing spell that was most certainly not supposed to maintain a corporeal body. Threads of golden spellfield slid across it leaving burning trails upon already smoldering flesh. Midnight and lavender pools spilled across the remains, sputtering and popping at the clearly missing segments as tongues of flame and smoke spit and tore at the exposed flesh.
Something had gone wrong; horribly, cataclysmicly, wrong. The spell was designed to focus upon a being, to enshroud and insulate the injured, to stabilize and secure their life before pulling them fully and wholly into the summoning matrix. It should have worked. There were safeguards and contingencies... there were protocols and protective layers.... so many layers... to ensure that something like that didn't happen..... couldn't happen.
A second peal of sound, like that of a stone falling from one of Rarity's gem carts into a rut of thick sludge, announced the arrival of a glowing lump of something which promptly crumpled what remained of their summoned victim. Twilight's stomach clenched as the body seemed to twist as if somehow still alive while the white-hot lump collapsed what she could only guess had once been its ribcage. As it lay, the body continued to sputter and sizzle as coils of blackened matter unspooled from within, a wretched stench filling the air.
To her utter horror, what remained of a shattered and immolated jaw opened and shut in obvious suffering before a second, tortured, wail tore the night apart.
And then, as if to add insult to injury, the spellform began to destabilize.
-~oOo~-
Three Princesses stood around the smoldering lump resting upon the cracked blue and white tile of what had been intended as a recovery room. The three said nothing. There was nothing to say.
What had started out as a rescue mission had, for some unknown reason, instead become an execution of the most haunting type. It had taken minutes for the thing to stop screaming, summoning the Royal Guard, who had arrived in a panic, weapons drawn. Even after they had arrived, the thing continued to twist and contort, as if trying desperately to flee from what was consuming it. Somehow, even with it's body torn and broken, burning and crushed, it had continued to scream, seemingly without need for biological mechanisms.
Two of the guard had soiled their armor. Princess Twilight had wretched until she could evacuate no more from her stomach... at which point she had heaved tirelessly in the corner of the room, clutching at her ears until the screaming had abruptly stopped.
One of the guard had watched in horror until the body stopped clawing at the tile, a process which took nearly 2 minutes after it had ceased to scream. He had watched until the broken thing had grown still before looking at his princesses and asking what it had done to deserve their wrath.
The three could only look back in silence until the guard had nodded and left. Where he had gone was a question nopony had deigned to seek answers to.
The Guard, having no reason to remain, had retreated and, nearly an hour later, had not sought out their Princesses. They had their orders: remain behind the second bulwark and wait for instruction.
It was Princess Celestia who finally broke the silence, her voice a raw whisper that spoke of forgotten scars and lost dreams, "It was the spell that kept it alive so long... the... the fail-safes.... the magic was trying to heal it as it burned... just adding more fuel..."
Princess Luna regarded the charred lump stoicly, but remained silent as wisps of smoke continued to climb from its twisted form.
"Princess..." Twilight weakly plead, "what did I do wrong?"
Celestia's pupils grew to fill almost her entire iris. She didn't think this was her fault, did she? This.... this accident, this horrible, horrible tragedy.... Twilight Sparkle couldn't possibly think this was her doing.
And then Celestia remembered having to visit her faithful student years ago when her assistant had sent a plea to save Twilight from herself. The town had forgiven her, of course, but nopony could forget the panic that had led their inquisitive librarian to enslave the minds of the populace all in an effort not to be 'tardy' with a report on friendship. Rumors still circulated about a small ragdoll with an uncharacteristic allure...
"No Twilight," the Princess of the Sun stated clearly, "this horrible thing was not your fault. You did nothing wrong."
"But I didn't complete the spell! It fell apart because I cou-"
"No. The spell failed, but it wasn't because of you. I dare say, it may have only functioned as well as it did because of your excellence in spellcasting. No... the failure..." Celestia closed her eyes and lowered her head, "... the failure was mine."