Fourteen years earlier…
Canterlot
The young trainee for the Royal Guard sat and played with his hooves nervously.
He could hear yelling coming from the closed door to his right. Behind the door lied his fate, the one answer he had been waiting for ever since he was attacked by his own guards for an act he could not remember committing.
It was the training grounds…earlier that same morning…
The voices…
For the first time in years, they had taken control.
Did it matter? We showed the princess how capable we are of fighting! She’ll want us in the guard for sure! A voice in the stallion’s mind, it spoke to him in the dimly lit hallway.
But…at what cost? Another voice spoke up. This one was weak and meager. You saw what we did to our fellow guard…we…we…
Buck him! Only the strongest make it into the Royal Guard! We proved that!
They screamed at us… The princess saw us…and what we did… She was horrified.
She just finally saw a true fighter for once, not like those spineless ponies that dare try to sign up for her personal guard!
Noctune slammed his hooves into his face, squeezing his eyes as tight as he could.
“Shut up…” he breathed, a mixture of sweat and tears falling from his face. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
What are you so scared about? The angry voice came back. Noctune opened his eyes.
It spoke again. Noctune had no control anymore.
We lost everything, unless you’ve already forgotten! Our parents are dead, our older brothers dumped us off the first chance they got, and that so called “marefriend” of ours kicked us out the apartment we paid for!
Celestia…I loved her. I told her I could change…but she didn’t believe it.
Stop being so weak! That bitch never cared about us! What were the last words she said to us before she slammed the door in our face…? Oh, yeah! “You try to work hard, Noctune, but you’re not good at anything! You have no future serving under Princess Celestia! You don’t even have a destiny! You’re only destined for failure, Noctune, and I can’t have you dragging me down with you."
“I’m not destined for failure,” Noctune whispered, bringing his eyes forward and gazing longingly at the poster in front of him. It was a Royal Guard recruiting poster, asking ponies to stand up and join the finest fighting force under the ruler of Equestria.
Earlier that morning…
Oh Celestia.
“But I am afraid of what’s behind that door…”
Six hours earlier…
Canterlot Training Grounds
He gave it his all in training. Everypony saw him, everypony gawked at him, everypony was afraid of him. They should be. He aced the archery station, tore apart the dummies with just one sword in less than seven seconds, and accomplished every obstacle in under record time.
Captain Bronze Heart kept an especially close eye on the dark brown stallion tearing it up in the obstacle course. Nopony came close to his times.
It was fantastic. Captain Bronze Heart knew for a fact that the newest recruit would be a shoo-in for Celestia’s personal guard. How could he not? With his incredible times, excellent swordsmanship, and surprisingly good archery skills—especially for an Earth pony—Bronze Heart knew he was going to make it.
But…that’s when disaster struck.
It was the time of the day where Captain Bronze Heart overlooked the hoof to hoof combat training session. Young recruits were meant to wrestle one another inside the red circle, and whoever fell out or gave up first lost. It would determine mental and physical toughness amongst the fellow recruits, and see who was able to conquer a fight against a pony of equal or greater strength.
Noctune, of course, was the first to step into the circle.
At first, nopony stepped forward. Bronze Heart sent an angry glare towards the other recruits, ordering the biggest one to step into the circle and face Noctune. He paid close attention for what came next. If Noctune could beat the stallion, then he has more than proved himself.
Noctune beat him. He beat him until his mouth was filled with blood, his bones were broken, and his mind was close to slipping into a coma.
That’s when Bronze Heart knew Noctune took it too far.
He strangled the large stallion with his dark foreleg, the recruit’s eyes nearly popping out of his skull and his face a dark purple, desperate for air. Bronze Heart yelled at him to stop, but he would not listen. A sickening snap was heard. The other recruits screamed.
The captain had no choice. He shot Noctune with an energy beam and allowed two guards to hold him down.
By then it was already too late. Medical staff raced out onto the field, checking the wounded stallion while Noctune simply watched with his face in the dirt. The medical pony stared into the captain’s eyes, her expression grim.
“He’s dead.”
The look on Bronze Heart’s face matched perfectly with the princess’.
Noctune looked up from the dirt, noticing Princess Celestia herself watching from the high podium. She looked at him with eyes as horrified as the other recruits on the field. Noctune kept on staring at her, his mind lost with the voices screaming at one another. He smiled at her from the dirt, a smile far too sickening for a pony to make.
They took him to the dungeons after that…forced him to wait until they called him back to the captain’s office. They forced him to wait as they cleaned the blood off the field.
“Noctune!”
The commanding voice of Bronze Heart bellowed from behind the door like a beast screaming deep down in Tartarus. Needless to say Noctune was practically shaking, his fate only reeling towards one end. An end he could see clearly.
As he stood from the chair and slowly entered the office room, Noctune could already imagine what was planned for him. Public whipping, burning at the stake, banishment to the moon, eternity in the Canterlot dungeons, whatever it was Noctune just wanted to get it over with.
He could barely stand with Captain Bronze Heart glaring at him from behind his desk.
Noctune breathed in through his nose, forcing himself to stare into Bronze’s eyes. His mind may be broken and terrified like a lost child, but his pride would stay strong no matter what punishment he was going to receive.
He stood up straight, puffed out his chest, and asked, “Yes, sir?”
His captain glared at him for a few moments more, finally sighing and checking the documents lied across his desk. He laid his hoof over a particular file, lifting up his eyes towards the dark brown stallion.
“Why did you do it?”
Noctune didn’t answer at first. He stumbled over his words, his eyes eventually falling towards his hooves. He brought his eyes back towards his captain, noticing how grave he looked. The heavy bags under Bronze’s eyes only added to the sinking feeling in Noctune’s heart.
He opened up the file with his magic, slamming his hoof so hard on the paper that it made a dent in the wood beneath it.
“Was it the other personalities that caused you to kill him?!” he practically screamed, demanding an answer.
Noctune began to break. His forelegs were shaking at uncontrollable levels, and his breathing became spastic. It was all he could do to stop from shedding tiny tears, his heart wrenching at the thought. He killed him. He killed a pony.
And he hardly remembered doing it. Hardly.
“I…I-I don’t…”
“Listen, Noctune,” Bronze Heart interrupted, pointing to the file in front of him. “I know everything, and so does Celestia. I told her everything. The medical records, the episodes, the voices, they all point to one thing and one thing only. What I saw out there wasn’t the stallion who waited all night to be the first in line to sign up for the recruiting station. What I saw out there wasn’t the pony who worked his flank off to be the top recruit!”
Bronze Heart stood up from his chair, both of his hooves planted into his desk.
“What I saw out there was a mentally unstable pony that should’ve never signed up.”
Noctune finally found a voice. He took a few cautious steps forward, looking his captain in the eyes as his own began to burn.
“I’m sorry! It’s just that I was trying so hard to impress the princess that I trained all night last night and I forgot to take my pills! If it was me out there I would’ve never…done that…but it wasn’t me! It was somepony else!”
“The voices…?” Bronze asked. Noctune nodded once, bringing up his hoof to wipe his eyes. Bronze Heart sighed once more, lying back into his chair.
“Be that as it may, the family of the deceased stallion still wants to see you in court, and Princess Celestia herself approved of it and will be appearing as a witness,” Bronze explained, noticing the loss of color in Noctune’s face. He continued. “All evidence will be legit, you’ll be found guilty of ponyslaughter, be fined, and placed in prison for ten years.”
“But…b-b-but I can’t afford the fine, and I can’t go to prison, either! Please, sir, you have to vouch for me, tell them that I have mental conditions and I didn’t know I was killing him!” Noctune practically begged, his eyes now full of tears.
Captain Bronze shook his head throughout Noctune’s rambling. All the breath was taken from Noctune’s lungs with Bronze’s next choice of words.
“I don’t train guards to cry, Noctune, and even if I vouched for you it would be meaningless. Even with your conditions you still killed the stallion, and all the other recruits were witnesses including me and the princess. There are no exceptions for this crime. I’m sorry, but you’re going to go to prison. I have no say in the matter.”
He stood up from his chair, walked around his desk and stood in front of the weeping stallion. Noctune barely looked up at him, but he was close enough to feel the heated stare he received from his superior. It was incredibly intimidating, and Noctune backed down.
He felt a hoof rest on his shoulder.
“Get your things packed and head back home. Your court hearing will be two weeks from now.”
Noctune finally forced himself to look up at his captain. Through it all, he would still be his captain. Through it all.
“I have nowhere else to go, sir,” Noctune told him, his voice barely rising above a whisper.
Bronze offered a little smile. “Then you can stay in the castle until then.”
He had served his sentence, paid his dues, and now lived a life too shattered to rebuild.
Just as expected, he was guilty of ponyslaughter and sentenced to ten years in prison. In that time, locked away like a beast from Tartarus, Noctune finally lost it. The voices overtook him, consumed him, and changed him inside and out.
Inside his own cell, Noctune’s mind far too broken to control finally found a meaning. The ponies that betrayed him, that knew of his condition and betrayed him anyways, they would suffer. Be it in ten more years, twenty more years, or even fifty more years. Noctune didn’t care. In his lifetime, Princess Celestia was going to pay.
They were all going to pay.
A year later after he was freed, Discord returned for a second time and aliens attacked Canterlot. Noctune didn’t care. The world was losing its mind over the aliens in Equestria, but did anypony lose their minds when Noctune offered his own discovery?
He had seen them before anypony else. The aliens.
And he would use them to his advantage.