Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot

by Equimorto

Railing [pfm]

"I'm going to ask you to imagine something. It's not particularly pleasant, I would say, certainly not what you'd generally consider happy. If you're bothered by excessive violence, or graphic descriptions of gore, if you don't want something like that on your mind, you can feel free to ignore this. I'm not planning to indulge in it particularly, but it's still going to get pretty ugly. If that's okay, I'm going to begin now.

"Imagine a pony, I'm specifically picking a pony for obvious reasons but you're actually free to imagine something else if it works better, who does not suffer from wounds the same way regular ponies do. They can be wounded, in the way you'd usually expect them to in fact, but they don't die from it, and the damage isn't permanent. When no one is looking, when a little time has passed, the wounds will just have stopped being there. And if they'd lost a part of their body, that will be there again. And if they'd lost their whole body, they'll just be walking around again, completely fine. I hope that gives you a better idea of what we're going to be talking about.

"Let's say it's a mare, for the sake of convenience alone. Let's also say she's not affected by age either, not nearly as much as anypony else would be, practically not at all. Thirdly, let's say she's royalty, something that could easily derive from the previously established assumptions. A seemingly unkillable, ageless ruler provides many advantages, not least of which is the simple fact that a nation can declare the perceived immortality of its own ruler and display it and make show of it to the other nations. One can hardly decapitate something if the head of it cannot be cut, and furthermore the simple amount of knowledge this mare might gather by merely existing for long stretches of time would result in quite the aura of respect being tied to her.

"We have then our mare, our ruler, ageless, capable of healing from seemingly any physical wound. Let's say, purely for the sake of the discussion we're having, that she, let's say, took a liking to the possibility of her shrugging off death and injury. A morbid kind of fascination with it. Maybe a sick infatuation, maybe the product of apathy born from a life stretched beyond its natural ends, maybe the result of sheer insanity. And say she began to harm herself, if harm it can be called given her condition.

"And say that the guards would find her guts on the railings around the gardens after she threw herself onto them from above. That they would be forced to clean the walls of the halls she blew her head against. That they would have to wipe the pavements of her blood, and throw the chunks of her body lost out every day. Say she would hurt herself over and over, no reason apparent beyond that she could. What would you do then with her?"

Comments

[Speckle]

Well, that's not creepy at all.....

[Saix]

Uh, try not to provoke her? Really, it depends on the why and what her mental state was otherwise, but the fact that she's leaving blood and gore around for other ponies to clean up instead of doing it in private isn't a good sign for her empathy and compassion levels, so sending anyone but another alicorn to talk to her about it seems risky. If there's no other alicorns around in this scenario then I guess senior staff in the palace could try and feel things out and see if it seemed safe to call a meeting of her and the senior staff/higher nobility to try and make her stop, or at least not leave her guts lying around for others to find. It's like that unnamed solider a while back said though, what can anyone but other alicorns hope to do against an alicorn?