• Published 31st Oct 2015
  • 3,246 Views, 307 Comments

The Ponies who Played with Fire - A M Shark



A year after the events of "The Draconequus with the Dragon Tattoo," Fluttershy and Discord's paths cross once again when two of her close friends are murdered and the evidence seems to point to a certain draconequus.

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Prologue

Author's Note:

To any readers who haven't already read The Draconequus with the Dragon Tattoo, I suggest you do so before diving into this story or you might not know what's going on.

The little equine hung suspended in midair, her sharp teeth set in a permanent snarl and her orange eyes blazing in her skull-like face. The glowing force field encasing her was like a spotlight, turning everything outside it dark; yet she still strained her eyes against it, trying to catch a glimpse of any movement beyond.

Suddenly something unseen tapped on the force field, causing her position to shift slightly, and the scant strands of hair that formed her mane to fall in front of her helpless-to-look-away eyes. She wanted desperately to shake her head to get the strands out of her face, but of course she couldn’t. She couldn’t and her captors all knew it.

Oh, how she hated them! She wanted nothing more than to spew flames over every single one of them, but all she could do was float there, immobile and seething.

Not for the first time, she wondered how long she had been there. It was so hard to measure time in the force field.

Her thoughts drifted to the few simultaneously terrifying and glorious moments when she had once been free.

She remembered seeing the six ponies get dragged past her glowing prison and how their colorful coats had stood out against the dark. She remembered the terrified, confused expressions they’d all had on their faces as they were dragged out of her line of vision.

She wasn’t sure how much time passed after the ponies were taken away. She had been floating there, not really focusing on anything, doing the closest thing she could to sleeping given her trapped state, when the darkness around her was suddenly rocked by an explosion. The force field around her dissolved and she tumbled to the floor with chunks of rock raining down around her. She saw some of the ponies bolt past her. She remembered trying to stand only to find that her limbs were stiff from forced inactivity. She remembered the fear that had gripped her and the way she had begun shrilling her distress. She hadn’t been able to form actual words—her misshapen mockery of a throat lacked the proper equipment to speak—but she could produce a loud trilling sound. And trill she did.

She remembered the white pegasus whirling around and flying back to her in a series of loops to dodge the falling stones. The pony had scooped her up before looping back up into the air again.

She remembered the rush of dizziness she’d felt with the pony’s movements, and now tried without success to sniffle through the cavity that served as her nostrils as she remembered the scent of the pegasus’s forelegs wrapped around her. She remembered seeing a bright light ahead of them.

Now she often wondered what might have happened if the pegasus had reached that light.

She would never know because a green glow had suddenly surrounded both her and the pegasus. They were dragged back into the depths of the cave, and the little equine was yanked away from her rescuer. She had tried to struggle, and spat fire in any direction she could, but the magic levitating her only snapped her mouth shut and immobilized her limbs once more. Having dealt with her, her captors brought in the white pegasus along with the five other ponies that had been with her. All six were stretched out on their stomachs, their limbs bound to pegs driven deep into the ground. As she was forced to watch, their transparent captors dropped nooses over the ponies’ heads and began magically drawing those nooses tight.

She would never forget the mixture of fear, disappointment and bewilderment she had seen in the ponies’ faces as they realized that they weren’t going to escape, that they weren’t going to be rescued, and that they weren’t going to survive. She saw them struggling vainly against the ropes, trying to draw what little air they could into their lungs, but one by one they had the life choked out of them. Just before the light left the white pegasus’s green eyes, she focused them on the little equine with a desperate urgency, as if trying to communicate some message, but the little equine could do nothing but stare on helplessly as the noose cut deeper and deeper into the pony’s neck until she collapsed to the ground, her eyes still open but no longer seeing.

The little equine never knew what happened to the dead ponies after that because she was promptly hauled off out of sight of them and magically shoved right back into another force field.

The very same force field that held her now.

Unbeknownst to her, that had been over ten years ago.