Chapter V: Grounded
Chapter V: Grounded
“This is a joke, right?” The bespectacled unicorn wasn’t smiling as he looked back and forth between the two armored unicorns who were also not smiling. His clipboard was floating forgotten next to him as he glanced to Flash’s despondent face, and then back to the stern guards flanking him, and finally to the secure wrap that was tightly constricting the pegasus’ wings.
Since leaving Twilight in the parlor, Flash had allowed his head to droop as he shuffled along between the two guards. He had stopped paying attention to their route as they led him through the white marble hallways that comprised the palace’s more opulent wing, usually reserved for visiting dignitaries and state functions. By keeping his eyes down, he had also been hoping to avoid eye contact with anypony, because he was afraid that he might recant his confession in an attempt to explain that he wasn’t the monster he had claimed to be.
Which is exactly why Sanguine Blade was the last pony he wanted to see. Flash’s panicked breathing would have been shallow enough without the sun-colored canvas band that had been secured around his body to keep him from flying away. He nearly stopped breathing entirely when the familiar scratchy voice rasped across his ears and threatened to pull his attention away from the easy-to-clean varnished cement under his hooves.
“Flash, boy, I’d say it’s good to see you, but, uh...” Using a hoof to nudge his glasses a bit higher on his maroon muzzle before stepping around the sterile white exam table, Sanguine took a closer look at his young visitor. “Didn’t I tell you I don’t want to see you any more?”
Flash didn’t need to look up to know that Sanguine was scrunching his nose and grinning, about to say, “At least, not at work.”
When the bound pegasus didn’t look up, or even chuckle at the overused joke, Sanguine set his clipboard on a brushed stainless countertop and turned back to the puzzling trio. “Now, there’s a few things that confuse me here.” He lifted one carefully-manicured hoof to Flash’s chin, raising the young stallion’s frown to a level with his own stubble-covered face.
“It looks an awful lot like you’re under arrest, and you look too healthy to need a surgeon. Do you want to tell me what’s going on here?” The concern in his old friend’s eyes filled Flash with a guilt that he had not earned.
One of the guards spoke up first, though his statement sounded almost like a question. “Princess Celestia has declared that he is to be Grounded.” Squinting one eye, he looked first to his partner who nodded to confirm what was spoken, then to Sanguine.
The surgeon’s bushy eyebrows climbed up his forehead as his eyes widened. “She wants what?” Blinking three times, he stammered, “That’s… that’s torture. Mutilation. I can’t believe that Princess Celestia would order that.” Straightening his posture and looking the nearer of the guards in the eye, Sanguine said, “I refuse to perform such a brutal act without written orders fr—”
With an unamused expression, the other guard wordlessly levitated a scroll from behind his back and presented it to Sanguine. Taking it in his magic and unrolling it, Sanguine talked as he read the orders. “I refuse to perform such a brutal act, at all. Ever. If she doesn’t like it then she can throw… me…” His mouth hanging open, he turned to Flash with the same look of disappointment that was evident on Celestia’s face when she first realized Twilight’s infidelity. “T-tell me that this… this isn’t true, boy. Please. Flash?”
Raising his eyes, Flash looked at the frizzy, wiry mane that he had watched turn from a lustrous silvery blue to a crisp white. Forcing himself to relax his jaws enough to speak, his mouth abortively formed several words before his breath caught up. “I wish I could.”
As much as he didn’t want to, Flash couldn’t avoid glancing at those golden eyes that had watched him turn from an angry bully of a colt into the kind of disciplined warrior that any pegasus would be proud to become. Age hadn’t dimmed the sparkle in those eyes, but now Flash had.
Watching his mentor sink to the ground, Flash wanted nothing more than to tell the truth, to explain that he wasn’t that kind of stallion. To explain that Sanguine’s years were not invested in vain.
“Isn’t that the filly you talked to me about? I thought I knew you better than that, boy. I thought you loved her.”
No, more than anything else, Flash wanted to protect Twilight. She could never be happy with him, but he could give her a chance to be happy. Because he did love her. Why he would love her still, he had no idea.
Flash looked up, only to see that Sanguine Blade had already turned his back, and was pulling books out of a bookshelf, glancing at them, and shoving them back with more force than was necessary. After a few minutes of grumbling to himself without finding what he was looking for, he marched back to the guards, refusing to look at Flash.
“I have very little concrete knowledge about what a ‘Grounding’ is, nothing more than campfire stories, really. And it’s not in any of my manuals, either. I’ll need a reference book from the library, but I don’t know where to look for it. Who even knows how long it’s been since they were anything but legend.”
Taking as deep a breath as his restraints would allow, Flash spoke up before the guard to his left could finish his teleportation spell. “It’s been about nine-hundred twenty-five years. Look in the military history section, first century A.N., ‘Fallout of the Lunar Rebellion’ encyclopedic compendium.” Looking up in time to see the guard give him a curt nod before disappearing in an orange blast, Flash gave half a smirk to Sanguine. “I was a teaching assistant for Professor Dust Jacket’s Rebellion Period Military History class.”
Sanguine didn’t smile, or nod, or acknowledge Flash’s comment in any way. He was still facing the spot that the teleporting guard had just vacated, his furrowed brow and deep frown threatening to crack as his eyes gathered moisture at the corners. Feeling that moisture burning his own eyes like acid, Flash tried to shrink away to nothing, bumping into the guard whose armor was colder than it had any right to be.
After enduring a few moments of hearing the graying doctor’s rapid breaths hissing in his nostrils, and the occasional sniffle, Flash had to fill the air with something. Whether it was to cover up the noise of a strong stallion breaking, or to keep himself from thinking about it, Flash didn’t care.
“After the Lunar Rebellion was put down, there was a lot of debate about how the rebels should be punished. The majority of pegasus clans had sided with Nightmare Moon, but most of the individual pegasi were just rank-and-file warriors, who basically just followed orders. But the top commanders: those who had betrayed Celestia herself, those who had swayed thousands to join the rebellion… they were Grounded.
“Grounding was more than clipping the wings. A pegasus with clipped wings will eventually grow new feathers, but if you cut off the wings, there is no way the pony can ever fly again, symbolically removing any chance of redemption.
“But there was more to it. A pegasus’ wings, like a unicorn’s horn, is our connection to the magic of the world. Our wings are far too small to fly aerodynamically, and there is no physical reason that a pegasus should be able to walk on clouds, or control the weather. We ride on the leylines of the air. Tie knots in the water currents that cross the skies. Shake loose the lightning, guide the winds, and… well. You can cut off the wings and magic both.
“But a Grounding doesn’t cut the wings off entirely, at the shoulder joint above the humerus, like an amputation. No, the Grounding cuts off the wing in the middle of the bone, leaving a stub that can’t be hidden. They didn’t want a Grounded pegasus to be able to blend in with Earth ponies.
“That left just enough connection to atmospheric magic to keep a pegasus on edge. Like going half deaf, and always wondering whether you really do hear a tune.
“Only nine Groundings are recorded in history. Both the Unicorn Council and the Farmer’s Parliament argued that there should have been thousands of pegasi, every single one who fought in the Rebellion, Grounded. But Celestia insisted on clemency for all but the worst. Most scholars say that her wisdom prevented a race war and a new ice age.
“Other scholars debated whether Celestia ever wanted any Groundings at all. Some say that she allowed as many as she did only to appease the Unicorns and Earth ponies. I suppose that my case will give some grad student an impressive dissertation.”
During the history lesson, Sanguine had stumbled over to a dark wooden desk that rested in the only portion of the room that didn’t look sterile and glaringly bright. A yellow aura surrounded the entire side of the desk as he haphazardly ripped off the single walnut panel. The sides of three drawers were revealed, along with a formerly secret compartment with a glass bottle inside.
Holding up the bottle and staring into the warm brown liquid within, the surgeon snorted, shuddered, and removed the cork. Flash bit his lip as he watched the trembling unicorn take a long pull of whiskey. Sanguine set the bottle down hard on the wooden desk, sending a hollow thud echoing down the room.
“Sanguine, you’ve been dry for years. Please don’t do this to—”
“YOU SHUT YOUR MOUTH, BOY!” Sanguine snapped his head around to glare at Flash, his wild mane bouncing with every angry heartbeat. “You lost any right to tell me what to do, or to try an’ make me feel guilty! Celestia knows, I may not’a been a saint, but now I know what you can do without a shred of guilt, I’ll never feel guilty again, that’s for sure.”
To the relief of the surgical staff who were pretending to be busy as far as possible from this new facet of their boss, another loud pop and blast of orange light signaled the return of the second guard, this time bearing a saddlebag. After seeing the anger on Sanguine’s face, he quickly glanced back to determine whether the prisoner was a threat, and, satisfied that no violence needed to be done, relaxed somewhat. He levitated a trio of books onto the desk, sliding them toward the middle and gently pushing the bottle of whiskey off to a rear corner.
Collapsing into his chair, Sanguine looked down at his books and waved a hoof dismissively toward the center of the room. “Strap him down while I read up and wash up. Prone, and unwrap his wings.”
Flash started walking toward the surgical table before the guards had to push him. The last time he was here, he’d needed to be lifted onto the table, and Sanguine hadn’t recognized him. To be fair, Flash had been covered in blood and ichor, and Sanguine, along with the rest of his staff, had been going on hour fourteen of surgery. While he’d been waiting his turn, the stallion next to him had bled out from a laceration the triage team had missed.
As he settled onto the icy stainless table, Flash looked to the guard on his left and asked, “Do you remember Lotus Whisper?” A puzzled look was answer enough, but the other guard spoke up.
“Yeah, we were in the same class back at basic. Good guy, I heard he bought it when the changelings hit the wedding a few years back?”
Nodding, Flash risked a look up to make eye contact when he replied. “Yeah, I was there. Can you make sure somepony checks on his mom from time to time?”
Unsure of how to reply to the healthy prisoner he was strapping to a surgical table, the guard just nodded without making eye contact.
A cart rolled up in front of Flash, loaded with an impressive array of gleaming instruments that he would rather have not noticed. Sanguine, now wearing a surgical gown, addressed the two guards in a calm and quiet voice with no hint of emotion. “Is the prisoner secure?” A few moments of telekinetic tugging on the tightly-buckled straps later, both unicorns responded affirmatively. “Then doff your armor and wash up, I’ll need your help holding him down when the saw comes out.”
Both guards performed identical salutes before trotting off to the prep area. Turning back to his patient, Sanguine explained in a monotone, “The history books specify that the procedure is to be done without anaesthesia.” He took a moment to carefully place a surgical mask over his muzzle, while Flash rolled his eyes at the amateur theatrics. “Of course, nowadays, we’re more civilized than that.” Leaning down to place his mouth just inches from Flash’s ear, Sanguine hissed, “Or at least, some of us are.”
After removing the wing wrap and sliding it out from under the prostate stallion, Sanguine then lifted up a side table from its vertically stowed position. Taking hold of the left wing, he pulled it out straight and said, “Hold your wing here. I’m injecting you with a local anaesthetic, and I’m nice enough to do that before I pluck the feathers.”
By the time the guards had returned, sans armor and in their natural coat colors, Flash’s left wing had a three-inch wide band of pink flesh halfway down the first bone, and the doctor was nearly finished with the second wing. One gray and one green unicorn stood at the foot of the table, waiting for their orders and looking nervously at the bare skin flecked with blood spots. They both winced at each audible ‘pop’ of a feather releasing its hold on a follicle.
The surgeon finished rubbing orange antiseptic on the exposed skin, heaved a sigh, and stood there, staring at Flash. Already strapped to a table, with his wings numb and tingling, he didn’t need any more help feeling uncomfortable. His eyes watered and his voice cracked as Flash pleaded, “Just chop me up already!” Almost in a whisper, he added, “And stop looking at me like I just broke your heart.”
Sanguine roughly took hold of Flash’s face in his hooves and lifted it high enough that the young pegasus had nowhere to look but in his eyes. “You did break my heart!” There was no sharp venom in his voice, only bitter disappointment. “You were all I had left, the closest thing I had to family. For once, I’m glad we don’t share a name.”
Flash bit his tongue when Sanguine Blade abruptly dropped his head back onto the table, but he didn’t care. He didn’t bother to close his eyes. He just stared straight ahead at a blank spot on the wall. The scalpel didn’t hurt as it separated his flesh, there was only a mild tugging sensation in the general area where he felt the coldness of the iodine’s solvent evaporating. He didn’t wince when he felt the blade dragging across the long, narrow bone. Flash was too numb to notice the fizzy hiss of his connective tissue peeling off of the distal end of his humerus, making room for the bone saw. What hurt was the sob that escaped the tearful surgeon’s throat as he lifted the circular bone saw off of the tray.
With a blink, Flash glanced up at Sanguine, who was now bracing himself against the rigid steel table with one hoof and covering his tear-stained muzzle with the other. The circular saw had fallen back to the cloth-covered tray where Flash could see its every detail. The blade had no teeth; it was more of an abrasive wheel, powered by magic of course. The hollow bones of a pegasus were apt to splinter if more aggressive saws or more forceful methods were used.
Planting his hooves back on the cement floor, Sanguine cleared his throat and motioned to the two guards in sterile scrubs. His voice was scratchier than usual as he said, “You’ll have to hold him down now. You, sit on his lower back, and you on his shoulders. No, turn the other way, put your hooves here. Now, use your magic to hold the wing root steady.”
There was no warning. There was no pain.
But at that level of intensity, there was no difference between the noise and the vibration. It was like a dragon scratching his claws against a chalkboard, only it was inside of Flash’s head, echoing and reverberating in the hollow of his every bone. He had become an infernal musical instrument, playing a song of torment so loud that he couldn’t hear his own screams. The grinding continued for ages, until there was no air left for him to scream. But the scream continued, fueled by the contents of his stomach, burning his throat and sinuses as he convulsed.
The grinding stopped, but the echoes continued bouncing through his skeleton, ringing his ears like alarm clocks being dragged through gravel. One wing down, only one more to go, and then he could cry himself to death in the comfort of his own dungeon cell.
“Dammit, boy, I just got started!” Shaking the slime off of one hoof and glaring at the sweating pegasus, Sanguine gruffly used his magic to lift the green unicorn guard out of the puddle of vomit where he had landed. He dropped the saw back onto the table, staining the pristine white cloth with bits of pink grit that slid off of the abrasive disc, other chunks still sticking wetly to the blade. Turning to a shining cabinet full of tiny glass bottles, Sanguine grumbled to himself as he opened the transparent door.
Flash turned his head the other way and halfheartedly tried to spit the taste of bile out of his mouth. He listened to the thinly splashing hoofsteps approaching his side, and waited for the needle’s jab.
As he closed his eyes, Flash felt the slowly spreading warmth relax his muscles, and he waited for the sensation to reach his head. Soon, he would wake up, and the pain and grinding would be over.
However, when the narcotic reached his brain, he did not go to sleep. Instead, he was wrapped in a blurry and suffocating warmth. He was being baked inside of a pie, full of marshmallows, each one swelling with the heat and pressing in on him from all sides. The fluffy white confections filled him with a permeating sweetness, cloying and slimy on the back of his throat. Flash was aware of his tiny body, wrapped inside of a normal-sized pie; but he was also a giant with tremendous rubbery limbs, about to take a bite out of a pony-sized pie. His bones shuddered and rattled with the timbre of a thunderous laugh as Pinkie held the pastry up to her mouth.
As she bit down, his wing and his world shattered. There was no more air in the room, or anywhere in the world. No wind, no rain, no clouds, no thunder. Flash felt his weight double as he began sinking through the steel table toward the ground, but the earth rejected him, leaving the wingless pegasus floating a few inches above the floor while a dozen spiders tugged at the edges of his bleeding stubs.
______________________________________________
The haze receded like a tide, leaving Flash moist and salty on a barren gravel beach, or so he imagined until he opened his eyes. The white cushion beneath his body was lumpy and hard, in sharp contrast to any other surface upon which he had ever happened to rest. Even actual gravel had never dug into his body this harshly. Of course, he had never weighed this much before, either. Was this why Earth ponies were so fond of soft beds and sitting cushions?
Lifting his heavy head, Flash gave his eyes a moment to get themselves both pointed in the same direction. When the two doctors had mostly coalesced into one, they spoke. “I can’t give you a traditional cloth bandage, so the surgical glue will have to do. It should wear off in a few days. The stitches will fall out on their own. The antibiotic shot I gave you should prevent any infection. If it doesn’t, I’ll never find out.”
Sanguine Blade immediately turned around and walked away, stumbling once and bumping into a tray of medical waste. A single orange feather fell off of the tray, slicing downward through the air and curving upwards at the last moment to glide along the ground until it finally slid underneath a cabinet that was mounted to the wall. Flash giggled, wondering if it would remain under there forever, a forgotten memento of his visit.
The unicorn guards had donned their brass armor again, returning them to their magically-identical white coats. They were accompanied by an unarmored Earth pony in a gray warden’s uniform, who watched the surgeon leave before turning to frown at the empty bottle that scattered and reflected the sterile blue light like a malignant sapphire. Sighing, he looked at Flash through weary half-lidded eyes, and asked, “Can you move your legs?”
Flash blushed and grinned, his head weaving in time to the kettledrum in his ears. “Are you asking me to dance?”
Rolling his eyes and sighing again, the warden shot a sidelong glance at the guards. “Get him up, we’ve got to take him all the way to the end of the long hallway.”
The walk was indeed long, and although the guards had to use their magic to help hold him up at the beginning, Flash had metabolized enough of the painkiller to at least shuffle along by the time they had reached the dungeon itself. Three of the ponies were silent, and one was gregarious and bubbly, largely incoherent, and quite philosophical.
The dungeon had been built for the prisoners of the Lunar Rebellion, and today was nearly empty, housing only the very few violent criminals, and the occasional recalcitrant thief who refused to be reformed by the metaphorical magic of friendship. The larger barracks which had once been a temporary home to the hundreds of non-fanatical soldiers who needed only minor rehabilitation before reintegrating into peaceful society, were now dry storage warehouses, protecting Canterlot against famine or siege. The kitchen and mess hall must have passed by as well, though Flash failed to notice them.
Cell blocks on the left were carved into the solid face of the Canterhorn, while the wall on the right was built of giant blocks of the same stone, with large slits to allow ambient daylight to illuminate the interior. The castle was directly above them, almost all of its visitors blissfully unaware of the prison integrated into its foundation.
They descended several sets of stairs as they progressed around the circumference of the mountain, and finally approached a dead end. However, as they neared the smooth back wall, Flash saw that the corridor in fact took a ninety-degree left turn, proceeding straight into the solid stone.
The August sunlight rolled almost straight down the eight-foot-wide hallway, stretching each stallion into a long shadow that blended into the darkness which shrouded their destination. They walked for a long time, every dozen steps taking them past a bundle of steel pipes jutting straight up out of a concrete-filled trench that ran along one edge of the otherwise-unbroken solid stone tunnel.
As they progressed, Flash’s eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he was able to see a wall of cinder blocks capping the end of the long hallway. A heavy steel door stood open, a foreboding invitation yawning hungrily for its new resident. Flash giggled, then pointed a hoof forward and said, “Lookit the sleepy wall.”
The door slammed closed with a deafening thump, pouring darkness over the inside of the room. The intoxicated pegasus hadn’t realized that he had already walked inside the room. After a few moments, light entered the room through a narrow gap at the bottom of the door, about two inches high, as his escorts walked away and took their shadows with them.
His half spin was enough to make him dizzy, so Flash stood still while examining his new home. The walls, floor, ceiling, and even the door were all painted in a uniform shade of chocolate brown. The door itself was set flush into the cinder block front wall, and judging by the sound it made when he gave it an experimental kick, it was solid iron, rather than a typical door made of plates sandwiching a locking mechanism inside. The top third of the door was louvered, letting in ambient light without allowing a view outside the cell.
Turning to his left, slowly so as not to become dizzy again, Flash looked to the wall and appreciated that there was a modern, though spartan, toilet and sink, both of brushed stainless steel. The rear wall was flat and featureless, but there was a sturdy bunk hanging from two chains on the last wall. A single brown blanket was folded on the uncushioned wooden planks.
The light grew brighter and warmer in color as sunset approached. Flash grinned and nodded appreciatively, as if he had just finished constructing himself a cozy house in the wild. “This place is pretty… fuzzy.” He looked down at his hooves and reeled from the immense height, then giggled. “I’m pretty fuzzy!”
The echoes of his cackles only caused him to laugh even more. A sudden feeling in his stomach, like the sharp drop of an airship running into an unexpected downdraft on the trailing edge of a thunderhead, made him quiet for a moment, still breathing heavily and struggling to control his giggles. It felt like he had swallowed a cannonball, pulling down inside his gut like one of the cast iron two-inch shells.
The cannonball cracked horizontally, splitting into a shiny white grin, jagged and blind.
Most ponies didn’t know this, but the harder alloys of cast iron are actually white; the black coating usually associated with cast iron is only a protective layer of oxidation on the surface. Flash knew that the inside of a cannonball would be white, because he minored in metallurgy at the academy. Looking down at his tummy and viewing his upside-down cell from between his legs, Flash began drawing an iron/carbon phase diagram in his head, murmuring a humorous little ditty about the various crystal structures that formed in the cooling melt.
His mnemonic song was interrupted by the cannonball whispering, “You’ll never laugh again.”
The breath knocked out of him, Flash melted to the floor and tried desperately to inhale.
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Okay. That was torture, please have this be a test, if not.... I don't know what to say.
4209835
i agree i pray its a test.
4210139 If i was Flash, and I just did what he did, Even if Celestial came into the room with Twilight telling me it was a test, and I passed, and I would be an alicorn, I would Scream at them tell them that this was the *-------* *-------------* thing that could possibly happen, and then I would break up with Twilight for going along with this plan and tell me that. I'm sorry, but I would be furious at both of them.
4210180 :freudpony: Vhy don't zhoo tell me how zhoo reeeeeeallly feel?
4210362 Do you really want that?
4210469 I'm... not that kind of doctor.
Well my heart just sank. I feel that despite not being particularly gory you manged to make the grounding suitably horrifying. Good writing even I am saddened that the likely hood of this being a test becomes less and less likely. I can't help but imagine how many ponies are now wrongly disappointed in flash. If anyone needed a hug it's this pony.
Six words: Twilight is an ass.
4210501 Don't worry. I'm just mad that Flash is getting punished, for only the suspicions of Princess Celestia, and Twilight Sparkles unfaithfulness. That just bites.
I've only feeled this feels before at the end of a story, when someone's died. And this is just the new guy. I really wish you didn't make me care about twilight's parents and boy shining is going to be devastated one of his subordinates did this.
4234913 Army of Darkness, Conan the Barbarian, Star Wars, you name it. It was a thing back in the day, just like the teal/orange movie posters of today.
The story is competently written, and the earlier parts were nice. Now, I don't mind dark stories, and things up to and including loss of a limb can be used effectively as a story driver. What kills this one is the entire situation around Celestia. It seems not only grossly out of character, for both Celestia and Twilight, but some of the arguments presented are weak and feel like the entire scene is just trying to excuse maximizing the validity of the Dark tag.And then, out of impulse, I peeked at the next chapter. "It was a dream all along" is definitely not up there with the better plot devices, but i'll give this another chance. <.<4400244
OK, so, after reading what "Grounding" was my brain came up will all of the following mess.
The following is very, very dark. So anyone reading this comment might want to just skip the whole thing.
I wrote a whole f-ing mini-story here.
Once I started I just couldn't stop. I also tried to keep it terminologically consistent but I'm sure I messed it up somewhere.
The whole "'removing of the wings" thing is a common enough story element but you hardly ever get any details. And when you gave me the details on how to go about performing a "Grounding" my first though was "What of the other two races?" and so this little mini-fic was born.
I'm going to save this and use it later. It's open for anyone else to use as well if they want.
Onward to the next chapter.
4400244
Way to ruin it for everyone else.
I was going to say "Down the rabbit hole," but looks like we're already in one. From a sinkhole.
“I refuse to perform such a brutal act, at all. Ever. If she doesn’t like it then she can throw… me…” His mouth hanging open, he turned to Flash with the same look of disappointment that was evident on Celestia’s face when she first realized Twilight’s infidelity. “T-tell me that this… this isn’t true, boy. Please. Flash?”
-I like this characterization of both of them...
-For personal reasons I don't know if I can keep reading this, but that is a psychological one, not one that speaks to the moral or literary quality of this story... I might be able to read either now or at some later date, but if I can't then I am sincerely sorry.
Going to continue in a separate post because you responded to me in a previous chapter, meaning you are online, and I don't want to you to miss whatever I can do.
“It’s been about nine-hundred twenty-five years. Look in the military history section, first century A.N., ‘Fallout of the Lunar Rebellion’ encyclopedic compendium.”
-Shades of Jesus submitting to carrying his own cross rather than using his divine power to get out of the whole situation. The involvement I mean. Of course, this is just yet more evidence that this is just a test.
“But there was more to it. A pegasus’ wings, like a unicorn’s horn, is our connection to the magic of the world. Our wings are far too small to fly aerodynamically, and there is no physical reason that a pegasus should be able to walk on clouds, or control the weather. We ride on the leylines of the air. Tie knots in the water currents that cross the skies. Shake loose the lightning, guide the winds, and… well. You can cut off the wings and magic both.
-Good world-building and building up the sacrifice.
“That left just enough connection to atmospheric magic to keep a pegasus on edge. Like going half deaf, and always wondering whether you really do hear a tune.
-Even worse... wow, you really know how to ramp things up... next you are going to tell us that it traditionally must be done without anesthetic (they would have at least had booze at the time of The Lunar Rebellion). Although I don't know if you could sell us on the doctor going for that.
-More to come... maybe. Almost certainly nothing within the next few minutes.
A gore tag would've been a nice warning.
9982979
Sorry! This was published before there was such a thing.