Princess Cadance and the Royal Respawn

by Skipping the pony pun

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Then Cadance said: ”She's not mine.”

”Oh! Cadance, that's – wait. Is that the part when Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash crack up and it turns out all this was a hilarious prank?”

”Heh. Oh, I and Shiny had her. But when we discovered our foal couldn't die, of course we didn't leave it at that. It took… some doing… but we got to the bottom of things. We shouldn't have. It turns out we're convenient vessels at best. We're allowed to birth, clean and feed her – take care of the menial work.”

”There are forces greater than ponies, Twilight. Vile, awful, impossibly greater. My daughter's life, the course it takes, even down to what ”we decided” to name her – hah! All willed by things that mold our reality like clay. Do you remember when we all thought giving birth to an alicorn was impossible? It is! But they wanted me to, so I did. That's why Flurry can't die! Her life's completely out of our hooves!”

Cadance was breathing heavily. She lowered her head and her voice. ”And that's why I have no say at all over what kind of mare my own daughter will become, or the life she'll lead. Flurry's in the hands of the vile power, marketing, and its horrible children, focus groups.”

”I wish I could've spared you that. But you never could leave well enough alone. I admire it, y'know. Your sense of justice.” She circled a hoof.

For her part, Twilight had bitten back a remark about Flurry's life being in their hooves at all. Now she waited for the punchline. When none seemed to be coming, she said: ”You know, when horror writers play this card, they at least come up with something like "Chzo'Callay, She Who Paints Blasphemies With The Inks Of The Violet Undernight." And what even are hands?”

”Good for them! That sounds horrifying.” Cadance extracted a mirror from her bags and hoofed it to Twilight. It was round, maybe the size of a pony's head, and looked distinctly ordinary.

”You'll need this for the rest. It shows another universe. The universe. Place it on the fourth wall, and break it. Try to do so gently, with as few pieces as you can manage, to get a better picture.”

Twilight turned it over a couple of times, then shot Cadance a ”seriously?” look. Cadance inclined her head in a ”Well, go on” gesture.

What's she playing at? All right, I guess if the door is on one wall, the bed and things are against the opposite one, the windows are on the third, that means there's an odd one out.

Twilight pushed the mirror against the wall at head height and found that it stuck. A moment's magical pressure in a precise vertical line cracked the mirror in two.

”Oh, well done!” Cadance said, but Twilight hardly noticed.

Magic permeated the cosmos. Magic was friendship. Friendship was harmony. Whether it was law or harmony that ultimately moved the world was a matter for academicians to debate, but either way all things tingled with magic, and with it, all events bent toward friendship in the end.

Except the mirror.

Through means Twilight nearly didn't want to understand, the magic of friendship held no dominion on the mirror. It was a nauseating emptiness that reminded Twilight of Tirek's rampage, a soft murmur of ocean waves that you didn't notice until it was stilled. She wanted to scream and smash the thing, but Cadance had said it showed another world. Was this happening because that entire world was like this? Tirek could be fought, but how did you fight a world? Something showed in the mirror, but the light was all wrong. She peered closer and saw…

”What? Pinkie?”

Pinkie Pie was trapped in a container with a colorful top and bottom but transparent, glossy sides. Her smile looked more like a rictus grin with how out of place it was on her still face. Pinkie was a verb, yet she wasn't even twitching. She wasn't even breathing, and the blood in Twilight's veins turned to ice... until she took in the Pinkie Pies below and above this one. Pinkie probably couldn't do that.

To the right, a profusion of Rarities grinned vacuously. Beyond them, a wild procession of animals and machines, most of which Twilight couldn't name, all encased in vividly colored chambers. Museum? Test subjects? A ritual? What do they want from us? Behind each pony, a row of identical ponies, all hanging on great rods of unpainted metal, leading to a smooth grey metallic wall.

Twilight looked down, and felt horrible vertigo as she realized her viewpoint hung unsupported in the air higher than many of Ponyville's clouds. She peered up… and up… and up. The wall was by far the biggest building Twilight had ever seen, yet everywhere grey, mirthless. Barren. It was amazing, but it felt wrong. How could the builders of this wast work not put anything of themselves into it? In Ponyville buildings were crisscrossed by little flourishes and decorations that varied wildly but all meant the same thing: This place is loved. In Canterlot ponies would never stop adding stained glass windows to a target this big. To leave the wall like this hinted at abject poverty (which obviously wasn't the case), the strictest of tyrannies… or an empty, resigned existence. An existence without friendship.

Then Twilight saw them.

The first word Twilight found for the creatures was gargantuan. A single one could've ripped the spires off of Canterlot Castle. Vaguely pony-like in body plan but almost hairless, they shambled about precariously on their hind legs. No two of them seemed to be the same size and shape. Twilight's breath hitched: their hooves split into smaller legs that almost squirmed with minds of their own.

The second was drab. Despite their hideous appearance, Twilight was moved to pity. Their rigid little ears and impossibly small, beady eyes gave them blank, emotionless expressions. A lack of tails made their toneless appearance even worse. They were dirt-colored with only minor variations, and they wore the most depressing clothes Twilight had ever seen. Here or there was a floral pattern or the glint of metal, but for the most part they wore little more than unicolored strips of fabric that made the least elaborate of Rarity's leisurewear look like a gala dress. It was like they only bothered with clothes so they could say they made an effort, as if they were ashamed of going naked.

Then three of them passed right past Twilight's point of view, and she found her last word.

Abomination.

Every bit of their skin was marred by texture. They crawled with lines, pits, creases. One had blood vessels visibly pushing against its skin, as if trying to break free. Instead of being single-colored or having a gradient, they were lighter there, darker there, then lighter again – how could they live without even knowing what color they were? Another changed color in disgustingly unnatural lines. Some kind of ritual scarification?

And the lines! The wrinkles! The tip of a single squirming worm-leg was more shriveled by far than all of Granny Smith. Nothing could be that withered and live. Had there be a catastrophe and they were all slowly dessicating? Were they even alive? What was going on? And the base of the worm-legs had enormous, obscene grooves gouged into it that looked like the claw marks from a predator, only then you saw the smaller lines and then the still smaller lines, as if their entire bodies had been slowly savaged one little bit at a time by monsters of all sizes, the blood of giants gushing everywhere, enough blood to drown Twilight, to drown everypony in her castle…

Twilight heard screaming, and realized it was coming from her. The mirror was cradled in a lavender glow and fell apart onto the floor.

Mercifully, Twilight fainted.

Author's Note:

That took a turn.

It was always going to happen.

I don't hate Flurry, but she broke the show's own rules. Not the first thing to do so in order to sell toys, nor last. It can make writing about her a poser, though.

Baby Flurry has the ability to vaporize a dozen ponies by accident, but not to understand what she'd done or why it'd be bad. Equestria's worldbuilding, of course cartoony, was still deep enough for this to be an issue. So how to write a story about that? If I had it only result in wacky cartoon hijinks, I'd break the setting's internal consistency. If I took things to their logical conclusion, I'd clash horribly with the tone. A story about killing Flurry over and over with no word as to how would've been way too spiteful (but fun), and I didn't want to go full AU.

I opted to square that circle by acknowledging that indeed, things don't make sense. The setting's internal logic has holes in it, and they're big enough that the characters have started to notice.

This sort of thing seldom goes well for the characters. Bear with me, if that's something I can even say after only writing like 3k words.

Oh, and here's a thought: in a world where breaking the fourth wall is the kind of unspeakable ritual that opens your mind to Things Pone Was Not Meant To Know, what does that say about Pinkie Pie, who can do it whenever she wants?

Comments

[NinjaMAster]

She lives with Spike. She likely knows what fingers and toes are.

[Skipping the pony pun]

10790922
That's true. But remember Rainbow's "What're hands?" line from Equestria Girls? People have made hay of that one for years. The line makes no sense, but my FACE makes no sense, so I went with it.