Sunset Shimmer Goes to Hell

by scifipony

"He's Mine!"

Considering the hot climate—with the sun beating down, I was already sweating even though it was only breakfast time—and Brandywine's implication that Tartarus was a lawless place, I expected Central to resemble Dodge Junction in southern Equestria. I'd seen pictures of the wood board buildings, boardwalk ramadas, dusty streets, salt lick saloons, stallions in tall hats, and mares in colorful cotton dresses.

Central wasn't Dodge.

I took time drinking at the public trough, looking around. The street, populated with pastel ponies of all races and a scattering of griffins, was paved with strange concrete of shiny mountain stone in a matrix of black tar. Nopony wore clothing, though most wore wide-brimmed straw hats. The squat buildings were built of baked mud brick, judging by where uniformly tan or brown stucco pealed off of the thick walls. Shed roofs of cracked red clay tile added a sameness rather than a spot of color. Under eave vents helped with cooling. Small chimneys smoked with the scents of fried hay and potatoes. For hearths only. Tartarus likely never froze over.

We walked into town, past boarding homes and pavilions that looked like tarp-covered flops. Unadorned communal housing, all of it. Toward the center of town, there stood a general store; a hoof-painted sign stated that, though the dark interior looked empty as did what might have been other abandoned shops. We approached a farmers' market stocked with stalls of lettuces, squash, and leafy shrub forage. A never ending dry wind whistled past the wood structures and snapped the edges of a shared beige canvas that provided shade from the sun. Our horseshoes clattered against the pavement and echoed.

Ponies, manes and tails mussed by the wind, quietly stared at me.

Green eyes. Blue eyes. Magenta eyes. How much had Lady Jewel embellished her story? The unnerving attention made me focus on the ground, manifestly the wrong thing to do entering a "lawless" town.

I heard a distinct splat.

Brandywine yelled, veered left, reflexively rubbing his left eye and face to remove what a glance told me was a gob of spit. A flitting shadow drew my gaze. A deep blue pegasus pony swooped from a roof-top perch in the shadow of a chimney. I'd been tamed three years, but reacted instantly—no street tough succeeded in ambushing me. I leapt high into the pony's trajectory.

Always endanger a pegasus' wings. It's the thing that'll dissuade any light-boned monster.

The determined pegasus braked, swerved, and alighted behind me, demonstrating acrobatic prowess. It was a mare. She had a dark ruddy fetlock-length mane shot with gold streaks, and...

…and bat wings.

Nopony beat Sunset Shimmer. No pony.

I cast as the night wing turned flank, bunched up her forequarters, and lifted her rear legs. The ambush happened so quickly, stunned Brandywine hadn't yet realized his danger. As she bucked, she had sufficient time to aim at his temple in what would most certainly be a fatal strike. Satisfaction blazed in her amber eyes.

Not going to happen!

I jerked her up in my magic, breaking her contact with the ground. With no bracing, her bucking movement instead propelled her forward, and—because she reflexively flared her wings—in a circle upward. I took that momentum, forced her to continue until she was upside down, then shoved her down, albeit not as forcefully as my spiked anger made me try to because, as happened when I tried too hard to hurt somepony, Levitation failed me at the worst moment. The spell snapped; she landed on her back. She made a satisfying whump as her spine hit the cement, and a whoosh as the impact knocked the air out of her. I hoped I'd broken something as her wings went limp. In fact... I found the recently learned spell mnemonics and the special shape of Force immediately at hoof.

"Brandywine is under my protection!" I yelled, "He's mine!" I'd make the mare pay for attempting murder.

"No!" cried Brandywine. "Don't!" He was at my side, having recovered his wits, his face still glistening.

I shoved him aside, interposing my body between him and her, despite the fact that both were larger and heavier than I. "I'll handle this!"

He reared and touched my horn, snapping my concentration.

With a loud, "Ugh!" I stepped forward and reared over her head, pedaling my hooves menacingly. "Don't even think of moving!" I shouted at the prone night wing.

Her slit amber eyes cleared, looked at me, and narrowed. "Don't let Brandywine's false smile fool you, Queen of Cliffside. He'll smile at you, but when you walk away he'll stab you in the flank."

"Nice... Mom," the colt said. "Real, nice. Mother, meet Sunset Shimmer. Sunset, meet Pear Brandy, my dear mother." The mare rolled her eyes. I noticed her cutie mark, a burning stick—a fire brand. How fitting. I stepped back, keeping my eyes on her as she looked to my right.

"How nice to see you, son, after all these years. Where have you been? Under maximum restraint? This capable filly is way too good for the likes of you," she finished, glaring at me.

My stomach soured. "You just tried to kill your son!" Again, reflexively, I interposed myself, pushing Brandywine back with my flank, snapping my tail at him when he tried to get by.

She scoffed, and with her eyes locked on mine, she carefully rolled over. Other ponies crowded around, murmuring. She said, "Our people, the Night Wing, and especially the Sisters of the Moon—"

"—Equidoran NIHList separatists—" Brandywine interjected.

"—can recognize betrayal when we see it. His is the worst. Like Celestia who killed Good Princess Rising Moon—her blood ally, her 'adopted sister,' to conquer Canterlot Mountain—he betrayed family!"

"Your son—"

She spat on the ground. "No son of mine. Not fit to have night wing blood in his veins."

I discouraged Brandywine from stepping forward with a slap of my tail on his muzzle as he angrily said, "I did it to prove Father's innocence—"

"Good lot that did! You said yourself, Cursed Celestia didn't believe him. Worse, your misbegotten fealty to the Usurper ruined a centuries-old movement short of wreaking overdue justice!"

"Justice?" I asked, "Really? Had your gathered magic collapsed Filly Stadium on Princess Celestia, how many ponies would have died?"

"Celestia's spawn?" She scoffed. "Who cares?"

She who had married one of that spawn and lived amongst them over a decade. The crowd gasped. Rightly so. This had to be why Celestia had sent Pear Brandy to Tartarus. That it shocked a crowd sent here for their crimes spoke volumes.

"And when Celestia cancelled her appearance, you decided to destroy a bridge instead?"

"Celestia's fault if she escaped and left others to die in her stead. You have to unearth the plant to eat the potato. And… Wolf Run had to be seen as responsible for something as we had committed everything to catching Celestia in Fillydelphia Stadium, and if not him, they would have figured out it was me and my family. For some unfathomable reason, Brandywine's aunts and I thought it important to get him back to Equidor."

She'd wrecked a bridge to incriminate her husband to save her son? For a moment, I just stared, suddenly understanding the logic of evil too well for comfort. "Hooves-down, Brandywine wins the bad-mom contest. At least mine only tried to kill me!"

"Step back!"

The phlegmy voice came from a rotund purple mare with completely white hair in her mane and tail. That grey salted her fur around her muzzle, below her magenta eyes, proved the white was due to age. The earth pony wore a steel helmet, and a khaki blouse under a breastplate. For effect, she reared—pedaling steel shod hooves wearing shoes that had a flange of wood to protect her ankles. Boxing, she could use the wood as a baton to subdue or the metal as a blackjack to do damage. No mistaking that her mass hid a good proportion of muscle. I recognized the star she wore as a badge from the cover of The Night Mare and the Sheriff of Dodge Junction. "Don't anypony move." Us three. "What happened here?"

Already, the crowd was fading away. An intrepid stallion said, "She picked her up in her magic and bashed her to the street!"

As everypony glanced upward to look for rainbow crows that weren't coming, I found my mouth and eyes wide, outraged, thinking, Way to be a biased witness. Good job!

"It was me, not her." Brandywine stepped between me and the sheriff. "Just a family spat, constable. The usual."

I fumed. "She ambushed you—"

"Sunset, please."

I shut my jaw and subsided, and not because of the command or because of the tone those words should have implied. After Flowing Waters, my adopted father, and Celestia had tamed me— convinced me that acting by the rules of decorum had benefits—I'd attended state events, a couple of Grand Galloping Galas, and quite a few dinner parties at her side or Father's. Precious few elite pony couples expressed affection or friendship in public. More likely anything but. But I had seen a few do so, and like any foal seeing a parent or adult act not-the-way-they're-supposed-to in front of a foal, I'd taken notice. When I'd greedily read the mushy passages in The Night Mare, I'd recognized the tone of such words in my head. Yes, that tone. Endearment plus a bit of an apology for having to say no.

I hoped Brandywine didn't misinterpret the burning flush on my face as anger. It wasn't.

The old mare said, "In all the years I've known Pear Brandy, she's never— Wait, you must be her son, Brandywine! That explains why the rainbow crows aren't mobbing you—though not why I haven't seen any today."

"I'm not staying long in Central, so it won't happen again. Have you seen my father, Wolf Run?"

Pear Brandy spoke up. "If he were around, he'd be at my side." Condescension dripped in her voice, but I could also tell she believed what she said.

"I've heard of Wolf Run, but from before I took this post."

I thought about how Brandywine had insisted he had betrayed his mother, and about his mother holding family fealty above all. I understood where his guilt came from. Like his father's odd loyalty, it was how he had been brought up. Talk about a tortured soul!

Sheriff Lavender Lather warned Pear Brandy to stay clear off her son or she'd find herself back in the "big house," which was apparently the factory-like building we walked to with the constable. Everypony here lived like earth ponies. The rainbow crows prohibited all magic, which explained why I'd seen unicorns use their hooves or mouth to manipulate everything from a tomato to a bag of flour. When Brandywine saw me staring, he added that rainbow crows often even chased pegasi and griffons from the sky because flight apparently required magic. Everypony looked somewhere between somber and sullen. Though many talked, none looked happy—though it might have been our presence.

Or that they lived in Tartarus.

Possibly that.

The only difference in construction between the big house and the rest of the town was five stories and bars on the unglazed windows. Inside were daubed-plaster walls with none of the flourishes back in Canterlot, and certainly no carved hearts or painted flowers, or painted walls for that matter. Lavender Lather had some paintings and a few photographs of ponies in her little office, but she was one of the ponies that had volunteered for the post.

Apparently, Celestia traveled to and from Tartarus, transporting volunteers. I gathered the attraction was immortality. Being here stopped the progression of non-communicable diseases, or aging.

That said, the group of khaki uniformed officers we were introduced to were inmates, ones that apparently acted reliably, keeping melees or other unpleasantness from breaking out. All shook their head that they hadn't seen Wolf Run. All nodded that they would tell Wolf Run about Brandywine if they found him.

A wary looking brown stallion with a tan mane, white socks, white hooves, and a matching white horn with an iron ring sidled up Lavender Lather and suggested the "vanguard" might gallop to the outposts to request that they be on the lookout for Wolf Run. The sheriff added, "White Stockings, also look for the rainbow crows," as she sent the volunteer on his way with a few of his fellows. The amber-eyed old fellow glanced at me before he and a group of officers trotted off.

Through the exchange, I got that Brandywine wanted me to say nothing. I just observed.

Lavender Lather asked Brandywine to do some magical repairs but offered breakfast in the officer's break room, first. I wasn't surprised when this consisted of coffee, beignets with barely a dusting of sugar, and sliced apples. The apples were sour. I could smell the sunflower oil in the square doughnuts, but they were very fluffy and good.

When the sheriff closed the door, I looked directly into Brandywine's amber eyes and whispered, "Nopony knows you can leave Tartarus whenever you choose, do they?"

Surprisingly, he started to blink. His eyes looked moist. The chair scraped the wood floor as he got up and stood next to me, awkwardly trying to look me in the eye, shuffling indecisively from hoof to hoof. He said, "Please don't take this wrong." He hugged me.

I heard him trying to hold back tears and failing. This was nothing I had ever experienced, especially to feel a tear drop splash on my fur and roll down my shoulder. I'd never had a parent, not even my adopted father, who'd physically tried to comfort me, not that I would have let anypony do that. I didn't do emotional tears— anger, fear, frustration. Emotion? No. I understood it, but until this moment, I realized I understood it only intellectually because I'd read about it, like in the Countesses of Horseshoe Bay in which the Heiress Miss Glamour was always on the verge of tears because of a groom, or a sailor, or some other hunky stallion who pulled her this way or that.

I didn't jump, and for awhile, I kinda froze. My dropped beignet made a soft plop on the table. I stiffly lifted a hoof to pat his back. His grip tightened.

He said, "Nopony in my life has ever tried to protect me. You saved my life."

"I did?" I said lamely. Well, I had. I lifted the other hoof and embraced him. "Yeah, of course. Protecting is what I do best, I guess. That foal surviving on the street schtick, being a queen, fighting to protect her subjects, ya know?"

He chuckled lightly and inhaled deeply. I did, too, and took notice of his warmth pressing against my neck and a comforting horsey smell that I decided to catalog as Brandywine.

Tentatively, I added, "I've never fought for a friend before." I'd never had one. Didn't really know what the word meant, really. But saying friend somehow felt right.

He released me and stepped back. He blushed faintly, and he scratched his ear. "I don't usually get mushy, you know."

"I don't usually let boys hug me, you know." I looked down and felt my face heat up. "But, that was okay. Didn't feel the urge for an instant to throw you across the room as I would have done had anypony else tried that stunt."

I looked up. He had a goofy smile on his face as I caught him drying a tear on his cheek.

He said, "But I get a pass? A permanent pass?"

Blushing again, I answered, "For a friend, yeah. Hugs are good." He lifted a hoof.

I tapped it, and laughed. "But I'm hungry now."

"Me, too."

We dug into the food, eating in companionable silence. I looked at the wall, blank but for two pictures. One was the typical official portrait of Princess Celestia, wings flared, a red-velvet gold-gilt throne framing her. The other was a tight bust of an elegant bluegray unicorn pony I'd never seen before, with a glittery deep-blue mane framed by a blue feathered background.

Comments

[Snow]

That was cute as hell.

[NIchtraucher]

8119695
"Tartarus! It's Tartarus." Cute as Tartarus.