And I Hope You Die

by Aquaman

Past the Last Exit

Breaking through the wards surrounding the castle proper was child’s play. They were thick, pumped full of enough raw energy to power the Empire for years, but brittle, woven haphazardly by somepony with a less than basic understanding of what magical strength looked like. With a little pressure in the right places, the matrices inside them spun apart and dissolved, leaving a gap big enough for an entire company to walk through. Flurry wasn't surprised. This was more or less what she’d expected: a flashy display meant to be noticed with no concern for form or future function, like a foal’s crayon scribbles on a plaster wall.

The inside of the castle looked a lot like the outside. Staff members and daily visitors were scattered around the cavernous halls, preserved like museum models where they had been at the moment of the blast, and the crystal walls and floor made the glow from the central hall as bright as the sun. Flurry had to shield her eyes to navigate around her frozen subjects, first with her hoof and then with a spell that filtered the light through a darkened magical film over her pupils.

Eventually, she reached the archway connecting the foyer to the castle’s main chamber, where she usually received supplicants and ambassadors—when she’d been that morning, just like always, until she’d been called away to the northern border to investigate a windigo sighting. By the time she’d learned there was nothing to see and nopony around who could’ve made such a report, she’d seen a flash on the horizon behind her, and she’d known without thinking what had just happened and who had caused it.

The moment she crossed the hall’s threshold, the overwhelming glare winked out, leaving her blind for a moment until her eye-shielding spell adjusted to the lack of light. Of course it was just a façade. It was meant to keep other ponies out—to make sure she was the only one who could reach this place. So far, so predictable. Exactly what she knew she could expect, and what she’d hoped beyond reason that she wouldn’t see.

Flurry Heart looked up, and the pony who’d done all this—who’d attacked her empire, who’d tricked her into leaving it undefended for a few moments too long—looked down at her from the room’s central dais. She was sprawled across the royal throne, hind hooves kicked up over the side, and in her forehooves she held a shimmering, shuddering hunk of the shattered Crystal Heart.

It normally floated above the throne, held there by the magic of the crystal ponies and their love for the family bestowed with the privilege of ruling them. It still floated now, but in a thousand jagged pieces that jutted out in every direction, torn apart and then held infinitely in mid-explosion by the sacrilege wrought upon it.

Normally, the Crystal Heart could break without causing too much lasting harm. It had in the past, in fact, more than once because of the mare who now protected it. But the Heart wasn’t broken now. It was desecrated. It had been ripped open at its core in a way that no invader or terrorist could ever have been capable of.

This—the frozen ponies, the fundamental breakdown of environmental entropy—was what the Heart could do if deliberately misused, if it was told to use love as a weapon instead of a salve. Flurry had only ever met one pony who could possibly imagine attempting something like this, and she was grinning down at her now, eyes alight with unholy magic and devilish glee.

“Hey there, hot stuff,” Cozy Glow said, swinging herself upright on the throne and twirling the Heart shard in her hooves. “Miss me?”