Chiaroscuro

by Baal Bunny

Rating: everyone
Tags: Dark, Flurry Heart, Slice of Life, Pony of Shadows, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Length: 2614

The Pony of Shadows, locked up in Limbo again after being so rudely expelled from Stygian a literally unknowable amount of time ago, receives a visitor.

The Pony of Shadows, locked up in Limbo again after being so rudely expelled from Stygian a literally unknowable amount of time ago, receives a visitor.

This was the only story entered in the 277th Writeoff contest, "Dancing Shadows," where it inspired the cover artwork created by GroaningGreyAgony. It also occurs to me that the story can serve as a prequel to a story over on my AugieDog account called "Shadow Heart."

Published 2024-02-12 18:20:00 UTC
Last updated 2024-02-12 18:20:00 UTC

Light and Shadow

I offer to kill them all, and they imprison me in this admittedly very charming oubliette! It's madness!

Of course, it might be that I'm mad. This place, after all, doesn't resemble an oubliette in the slightest. It's more an ever-changing mass of dark, billowing clouds through which I'm eternally swept, a dark, pony-shaped mass that gathers and sheds substance every bit as promiscuously as the roiling storm around me.

Ooo, promiscuously. I like that.

Still, Limbo isn't an oubliette, no matter how much I enjoy rolling the word around in what passes for the back of my throat. But now that I'm here alone again, it's definitely a prison, the land of my exile, a horrible and squalid cesspool into which I've been both ejected and injected.

And just because I offered to kill them all! The ingratitude of it continues to rankle!

Of course, that I can express my outrage at their ingratitude bothers me more than their ingratitude itself. I was once—and still am, I suppose, for all intents and purposes—the Pony of Shadows, a beast more of legend than of fact, a monster spoken of, when I was spoken of at all, in hissed whispers.

Ooo, hissed whispers. I like that, too.

But there it is again! I'm a force of nature, a dark whirlwind of pain and destruction, not any sort of a person who can think and engage in discourse and have "likes" and "dislikes"! What's happening to me?

I know the answer to this question, of course. It's not a "what" that happened to me but a "who". That grotesque pustule, the last in a long string of ponies who've summoned me to take possession of them so that I might offer my gift of eternal and quiet contemplation to a universe overflowing with life, light, and other forms of frenetic hedonism.

Ooo, frenetic hedonism. Someone should really be writing this stuff down!

Except they shouldn't! I shouldn't even be thinking all this! I should be drifting in unadulterated diffusion with no wants, no needs, and certainly no desires until some other creature of breath and blood pulls me into being to endow the cosmos with the peace that only I can give!

But I can't. Because of that damn Stygian...

He did something to me, left a part of himself behind in me after those rude, ungrateful ponies threw me back into Limbo when all I was trying to do was kill them all! And now I'm something else, something that shouldn't exist, a new and horrible sort of a something that thinks and feels and monologues throughout the timeless time surrounding me, throughout the spaceless space engulfing me, throughout the—

"Hey!" a voice shouts.

But there should be no voice.

Unless—

"I mean, c'mon!" it shouts again. "I'm summoning you over here, y'know!"

At which point, the entire character of the realm changes. A rough patch of dusty ground slams up beneath my hooves, the sudden gravity giving that direction a powerful feeling of "down" after so many weeks or years or decades of nothing but swirling uncertainty. I form more solidly into a shape that I recognize: four legs, a neck, a tail, a head, wings, a horn, my mane streaming out behind me. And standing before me—

She's a mare, fairly young but glaring up at me with the pout of somepony who's long since become used to getting what she wants when she wants it. The large, limpid eyes at the heart of that glare would no doubt be considered a lovely shade of blue under non-glaring conditions, and the mane above that pout swirls like some unholy amalgamation of taffy and cotton candy, all pinks and purples and blues.

Damn you again, Stygian, for letting me know what taffy and cotton candy are...

Further observation shows that she's got wings and a horn the same as I do, something that surprises me but shouldn't: I should be beyond surprises, after all. And her hide, which at first glance appeared to be an ashy sort of gray, under my aforementioned further observation, now reveals that the dark layer lies on top of her true coloration. She's actually bright pink.

"Attend me, beast," she says then, the rasp behind her words absolutely phony.

I bend my neck to lower my head so I can peer at her more closely. "Were you trying to dye your coat black?"

"Hey!" She takes half a step back, the crystal clarity of the exclamation the same as the first "Hey!" I heard from her. She stops herself, however, with visible effort and stomps a hoof, the affected roughness back when she speaks again. "You will treat me with the respect to which I'm due!"

My first impulse—to smack a forehoof into the side of her obnoxious face—takes some effort to stifle. That she's here at all shows her to have a certain amount of power and a certain amount of willfulness. If I'm to emerge from this oubliette and continue bringing my gift of sweet stillness to the cosmos, I shall need a ride out, after all. "Respect," I therefore say instead of kicking her, "is a coin to be earned, Little Princess, not a tribute to be demanded."

The petulance dripping from her dries instantly, her eyes widening. "How did you know I'm a princess?"

It's a question I was just asking myself, in fact, but the answer—that the foul pieces of that thrice-bedamned Stygian still crunching around inside me are telling me things—isn't one I'm interested in giving her. So I take the slightest bit of a step forward and say, "What's your name, Little Princess?"

She takes a full step back this time, and I allow my inner smile to crackle along my snout, my teeth as sharp, I know, as flaked obsidian.

This gets her grouchy again, and she leaps into the air, her pinion feathers sparking with pale yellow fire. "I'm your summoner, beast, and that's all the name you need to know!"

Disturbingly, I find my eyes traveling along her pleasant curves, but I tell myself that it's just so I can find her cutie mark unsuccessfully buried beneath the unfortunate dye job: a blue heart, faceted as if crystalline.

More chunks of Stygian bob to my interior surface. "You're the princess of the Crystal Empire, aren't you? Something with the word 'heart' in it, I'm thinking."

"Don't say it!" It's more a scream than a shout, sheer power bursting from her and crashing through me. The force of her magic slashes ribbons from my cloudy surface and forces me to crouch and cower lest I dissolve even further. "Don't you dare say that name to me!" she continues shrieking. "I'm not that insipid little creature anymore, and I never will be again, either! Not ever, ever, ever!"

The onslaught snaps off, and she exclaims, "Oh! Oh, my!" And the magic that envelops me then is warm and soothing, the very definition of gentleness, knitting me back together with delicate care and concern. "I'm so, so sorry! I didn't mean to—!"

Then the warmth is gone, and I'm dumped onto the dusty surface in much the same condition as I imagine I was before this odd encounter began. "I mean, uhh..." the princess says, uncertainty a sour and salty cloud around her, and her voice becomes raspy once more. "Don't cross me again, beast. I have a use for you, so I'd rather not destroy you if I don't have to."

The picture I'm forming of this adolescent disaster is chilling me in ways I've never been chilled before. Because, yes, as I may have mentioned, I've never had the capacity to be chilled before. But more than that, I'm seeing a number of ways in which this princess will likely crash and burn before she can get whatever it is she thinks she wants, and worse than that, ways in which she'll be even more likely to take me with her.

And as much as it pains me to do so, I thank Stygian in the darker, mistier recesses of what passes for me these days. For without the lumps of himself that he's left like insect legs between my teeth, I would have no idea how to proceed.

But since I do have those lumps...

"You don't want to do this," I say to the princess. "And don't bother denying it: the reluctance seeps from you like sap from a freshly cut tree."

Perhaps it's my imagination, but the clouds above us seem to cease churning for just an instant. And then—despite my admonition—she begins denying it. Rather strenuously, in fact.

"How dare you?" she screeches, and the jagged yellow lightning that shoots from her horn definitely gets the clouds going again, puncturing them like smoke-filled balloons and stirring that smoke into miniature tornadoes. "I'm not a child anymore, not a stupid, simpering foal who can't control her power and shatters the Crystal Heart without meaning to!"

The lightning lashes out and wraps around me, a fiery lariat hooking its barbs into me in ways that—again—shouldn't be possible. She rears back on her hind legs, and with a flex of her neck, she wrenches the lightning back toward her, dragging me across the ground. The pain is like nothing I've ever known before, and I'm completely unable to keep myself from sliding up to her front hooves when she brings them back down with a pair of thunderous crashes.

Silence follows, and I look up through a sharp red veil of agony to see her glaring back down at me. "The next time I shatter the Crystal Heart," she more hisses than says, "it will be because I've drained every last joule of its power and used that power to put everypony into their proper places: Mother and Father in the dungeon and myself upon the throne!"

I have no flesh, and yet I can feel it tearing quite distinctly. Still, I'm able to focus enough to get two words out: "Fooling...yourself..."

"Silence!" She rewards me for my impudence by tightening the ring of daggers that are digging into me. "They all think I'm such a good girl, such a pliant girl, such an idiotic girl! But I found you, Pony of Shadows, after Auntie Twilight and Stygian and Starswirl and Starlight and Sunburst, the greatest magical minds of the last thousand years, destroyed every trace of the spells that open the way to you! For nothing can keep me from my destiny! And nothing will!"

She flings me away, spattering me like mud over the rocks before her, but I can hear the words flowing from her mouth, the words of power, the words that the elemental forces of the cosmos attached to me not long after ponies first began using words. She's binding me to her, absorbing my power, taking all that I am and all that I have and subsuming it into herself.

Or so she thinks.

They all think that, every hungry sorcerer, every grasping witch, every foolish little pony driven to seek me out when they think they don't have what they deserve. I'm the Pony of Shadows, after all, and I can give them the power they need to take what's rightfully theirs.

It's a lovely and convenient little fiction that I haven't been able to appreciate before. So yes, damn Stygian to the deepest pit of Tartarus for what he's done to me, but toss a little pillow in after him upon which he can rest his head. For if he hadn't inadvertently given me a sense of self where I had none before, I shouldn't be able to see how cleverly I curse all those who seek me.

I'm flooding Flurry Heart's mind and body now, and I find myself in complete agreement with her on one point at least: that name definitely has to go. She's trying to push her juvenile little schemes at me, the ridiculously elaborate revenge ploys she's been stewing over to punish her mother and father and aunt and other assorted ponies, her grandiose plots to seize the throne of the Crystal Empire and take her place as ruler. But I brush them aside like the tripe they are.

For I'm the Pony of Shadows. I exist only to destroy, and now that she's taken me in, I shall set about once again to bring my gifts to the material world. Death and ruin and dust and—

Something kicks me hard in the side of the head, and I blink to see that it's my own forehoof. "No, you don't!" Flurry Heart's insipid little voice screams. "I'm in charge here! Me! Not you! I'm the one who says what happens to Mom and Dad and everypony! And it won't be you just killing them! D'you understand?"

She...she's actually fighting me, her fiery lightning flashing through the black clouds that I've brought tumbling into her mind. She's doing a damn fine job of it, too. Could she possibly—?

Could she actually force me to submit?

I can feel the sweat running down our joint forehead, and I slash through her thoughts looking for something I can distract her with, something I can offer her that will come close to fulfilling both our goals before she can lock me down, bend me to her will, slash me open and suck out the—

The images of her parents, relatives, and other authority figures chained to the rough walls of a dungeon. Yes! I can work with that!

"Your Highness," I say, projecting my deepest, roundest, most reassuring tones into her vapid and noisome mental processes, "why settle for a mere dungeon when the entirety of Limbo stands at your beck and call? Imagine it! Every pony, every griffon, every dragon and changeling, hippogriff and yak, all those creatures who refused to acknowledge your greatness stuck here in darkness and despair. No more-thorough prison has ever been constructed than this non-place over which you now reign."

Her assault suspends, her boiling flames freezing at the point of vaporizing my final defenses. "Prison?" she asks. I feel our head move, see through her eyes that she's actually taking in our surroundings for the first time. "I can put them all here?"

"Every last being in Equestria," I assure her.

"Every last being," she repeats, and the warmth I feel growing in our chest tells me that she likes the idea. "Yes. Every last being consigned by my hoof to Limbo..."

Except for Stygian, of course, but I keep that thought to myself. I see from her memories that he's still alive and is at least somewhat known to her. I shall therefore prod her gently, subtly, quietly but unceasingly to consider him a figure of ultimate authority. Let her scrape all of Equestria clean of life and stuff it all into this cloudy oubliette.

Stygian, though, he'll be mine...

"Ours," she says.

I blink our eyes, and she laughs with our throat. "I don't mind a little bit of collaboration, after all," she says. "And I have to say—"

Our horn crackles, and a section of air to our left solidifies into a reflective surface. Turning our head, I see us there, the shape we've assumed together. We still curve in all the ways that a young mare ought to, but we're now three times larger than Princess Celestia, a storm cloud in pony form, lightning dancing within us.

"This is a very stylish look," she concludes.

I can only agree. "Shall we, then, Princess Shadow Heart?" I ask.

And thunder roars as we fall upon Equestria.