Chapter Three

Dark Motives

Twilight was under no sleepy delusions as to her situation when she woke. This was partially due to her sleep being plagued with pain and nightmares of being crushed beneath giant metal pony hooves.

It was also likely due to her complete inability to move.

Opening her eyes, she blinked against the sudden light. A bright lamp was positioned just above her. She tried to struggle, but soon realised that it was hopeless.

She was bound by iron bands to a large slab of concrete, her rear legs pinned together below her body, her front legs stretched out to the sides and secured. Her wings were pinned to her body with a tight strap around her midsection and her horn was still encased in the magic limiter.

Her vision cleared as she blinked and she saw that her slab was positioned in the middle of a small and almost perfectly square room. Her head was bound by a strap across her forehead, preventing her from looking anywhere but directly up, so the rest of the room was hidden beneath the range of her sight.

Obviously, her situation had worsened as she slept again. It seemed every time she fell asleep - or was knocked out cold by the painful shocks those Celestia-damned unicorns kept sending through her horn - she woke up in a significantly less advantageous position. It was a pattern that Twilight hoped wouldn’t continue because she couldn’t see any way that her current situation could get worse.

She immediately wished she could take that thought back as an off-yellow head appeared in her sight.

“Oh good, you’re finally awake.” Flam grinned, setting Twilight’s nerves on edge and igniting a spark of hopeless anger.

She just glared at him, not saying a word.

He had the upper hoof though, and he knew it, so the daggers she was trying to shoot at him with her eyes did nothing but widen his smile.

“You can glare all you like, Princess, but I can assure you, whatever you think your situation is at the moment, you’re wrong.” Twilight blinked at him. How could she be wrong about the direness of being strapped to a concrete slab in the middle of a crazy unicorn-only city?

Flam’s grin grew menacing and he disappeared out of her sight. “Whatever you think your situation is,” he heard him say from off to her right. “It’s actually much, much worse.” He punctuated this by returning to her vision holding a scalpel that glinted in the light from the overhead lamp.

Twilight’s eyes widened.

“Yes Princess, you might want to slow down with these shocked realisation. We don’t want your heart giving way before the rest of you does.” The way he was emphasising the word ‘Princess’ made it blatantly obvious that she was no Princess here. He flippantly spun the blade around his hoof again. “You know, our… questioners, prefer to use magic when forcefully interrogating a pony. Even if just to hold the knife.” Another flourish. “I, however, think that I’d prefer to do it by hoof, to get a more personal feel for the subject.” He spun it around his hoof again, this time following with a small toss into the air. He leaned forward.

Twilight tried to protest and began shouting wordlessly, trying to move away as he brought the scalpel up to her right foreleg, but her bindings made her efforts useless.

The blade felt ice-cold as Flam lightly touched it to her skin, and Twilight’s breath caught in her throat, eyes widening in horror.

He wouldn’t actually cut me would he? She thought desperately. He’s not that twisted, right? She was glad she wasn’t speaking, because even her thoughts were sounding desperate. Despite her immobilised head, she could still see Flam’s face and he seemed to hesitate, a look of uncertainty crossing his features.

The look quickly disappeared however, replaced by an expression of grim determination. The coldness grew deeper as she felt the pressure on her skin increase. The chill suddenly changed to a spot of hot fire as the blade pierced her flesh, quickly turned into a line of pain as he drew the instrument across her leg.

She only just managed to stifle her scream into a pained whimper. The cut was short, barely the width of her leg, but it released a long stream of blood down her limb and onto the slab. She could feel it slowly pooling against her side. Apparently he was that twisted.

“Why?” she managed to ask, almost keeping her voice steady while trying to force the tears away from her eyes. “What do you want from me?”

Flam just chuckled, spinning the scalpel around on his hoof. “What do I want? Well Twilight, I don’t actually want anything from you. This is just all part of the procedure. As to why, well…” he trailed off for a moment, his eyebrows narrowing in puzzlement.

He shook his head, as if to clear it, and glared down at her. “The why doesn’t matter to you right now, Princess.”

Twilight filed his reaction away for later study. It was odd that he would suddenly lose his train of thought like that. There was some significance to it, she was sure.

Her own thought train was interrupted by another line of fire, right next to the first as Flam made another cut on her leg. This one was deeper, the heat more intense and the blood spill faster.

She didn’t manage to contain her cry of pain this time, unexpected as it was, and her tormentor grinned, his composure restored. He made several more cuts in quick succession, each one directly beside the last and Twilight had to clamp her teeth together to stop herself from screaming. Tears streamed down her face and her foreleg seemed to be ablaze while her side slicked up with blood that was pooling on the bench.

Flam dropped out of her sight and she heard some rustling, along with some clangs and bangs. When he returned, he was holding an opaque white bottle with a nozzle on the end, designed to squirt liquid in a small jet when the bottle was squeezed. He rolled it around in his hooves for a few moments, looking thoughtful, before bending over her bloodied leg.

The pain suddenly increased tenfold and she screamed, her limbs involuntarily spasming, trying to escape as her throat ripped itself raw and tears streamed down her face.

Flam laughed, somewhat shakily, though Twilight could barely hear as her breath ran out and she lay panting, trying desperately but weakly to be free from her bonds and curl into a sobbing ball, nursing her throbbing leg.

“Don’t worry Twilight,” Flam chuckled. “That was just some disinfectant, to stop these going septic. It has a few extra ingredients, of course, to give it a little more zest.”

Twilight wished she could glare up at this maniacal unicorn with a gaze that promised severe repercussions, but all she could do was squeeze her eyes shut and clench her teeth against the pain.

For the moment, Flam seemed content to watch her squirm weakly against her bonds, smiling as tears streamed down her face from the blinding agony in her leg. It was almost unbearable, still throbbing as if a red-hot poker had been drawn across her skin.

Every instinct she had demanded that she begged, pitifully, for the pain to stop. She wasn’t used to this kind of treatment, this kind of pain. The worst she’d felt was when she’d hit her horn during a visit with Fluttershy and spent the next week or so in bed recovering from severe headaches and magical feedback. This was so many magnitudes worse, but she managed to force the urge to plea pathetically for her life down, using her anger at this stallion and the situation he had put her in as an aide.

She needed all the anger she could get, she found out, as her world became one containing nothing but pain and the cold slab she was strapped to, with glimpses of the feel of the bonds and the warm blood running down her skin and fur.

Flam worked quickly, moving his way along both her forelegs and her rear legs, making several cuts in quick succession, then moving on to another area. Once he had made a small patch of cuts on each of her limbs, he put down his scalpel and picked up the disinfectant bottle again.

Twilight would whimper and stifle her cries throughout the cutting, then scream her lungs out as he squirted the acidic-feeling liquid onto her still-bleeding wounds. He would then give her a reprieve and let the burning feeling settle in before starting again, making another series of cuts on each of her limbs.

The disinfectant seemed to help with the bleeding a little, but it wasn’t long before Twilight was feeling light-headed from blood loss. It was at this point when he had just made his fourth round on her limbs that Flam stopped and, after a moment, unstrapped her head, which immediately lolled off to the side, lacking the strength to hold it up as she was.

Dimly, she saw the rest of the room with blurry eyes and spinning head. The walls were lined with polished steel benches, each one a flat tabletop with sets of tools laid out in neat arrays, from small scalpels and knives to long saws and cleavers, all impeccably clean. Each bench had cupboards above and below, none of which were open, but the upper ones had glass fronts and Twilight could see bottles, jars, cans and boxes. They were all labelled but Twilight could read none of them, distant and hazy as they were.

Her limbs throbbed, each pulse drawing more tears from her eyes. She had long since given up trying not to cry, her tears coming as freely as her cries of pain did. Dimly, she was aware of the thought that this was a monstrous thing to do to a pony, strapping them to a table and slicing them up as if they were a slab of meat, but her mind was too foggy with blood loss and pain to pay much heed to the thought.

Flam seemed content to let her simmer for a time while he meticulously cleaned his scalpel and wiped off most of the blood that has gotten on his hooves. He didn’t give her long, however, as once he was done washing his hooves, he returned with the bottle again and gave her another thorough dousing with the evil stuff. Her mind was close to shutting down from the torment, but just as she was about to black out, a bizarre smell hit her nose and lurched her fully back into the waking world.

Flam was holding a small pot under her snout which was emitting a scent that was sickly sweet but seemed to be spicy, tangy and bitter all at the same time. The vile unicorn had a grin on his face.

“Magically enhanced smelling salts,” he explained. “You can be blacked out completely, but after one whiff of this you’ll be fully awake in no time. We can’t have you passing out on us and missing the fun, can we?”

Twilight tried to shoot him a glare, but she could barely move her head, let alone adjust her expression or emit any semblance of willpower or defiance. She barely had the energy left to scream.

It seemed Flam was done, however, as he soon returned with a hose and gave the bench - and Twilight - a freezing cold high-pressure shower, washing away all the blood. She couldn’t even struggle, her energy drained, the slashes across her legs burned, throbbing in unison with her throat. The smelling salt was the only thing keeping her awake.

Seemingly without a signal, a door opened somewhere out of her field of view. She couldn’t move her head enough to see who it was, but she found that she didn’t care. She became vaguely aware that the straps holding her limbs in place were being undone before she was dumped unceremoniously onto the floor. Dimly, part of Twilight’s mind cursed Flam, and hoped that Celestia would send him to Tartarus for all of eternity, but all she could focus on was the pain.

The cuts were all strategically positioned that they either grated on her own fur, or on the floor whenever she was sitting or lying down. It wasn’t as bad as the disinfectant, but it was enough to make her want to cry out at the stab of pain the cuts sent up her limbs as the new pony hoisted her up onto his shoulders, her hooves dragging on the floor, and carried her out the door.

She was still conscious when they arrived at her cell. She was lucid enough to realise that the torture chamber must be in her prison, high up on the side of the mountain. The thought would do her little good, and gave her no comfort.

After the bars slid down, the pony carrying her moved inside and dumped her on the ground at the back of the cell, right at the spot where the collar and chain attached to the floor. WIth a burst of green magic and a snap, the collar fastened itself around her neck.

Twilight couldn’t muster the energy to struggle. She only just managed to curl herself into a ball and hug her tail, matted and dirty as it was, and cry. In the last moments before the smelling salts wore off, while her vision was fading to black, she heard Flam chuckle as the bars clanged, returning to block the entrance.

~~~~~~~~~~

When she awoke, Twilight’s world was pain. Her limbs burned from the cuts and her throat was raw from screaming. Every move was painful as her wounds rubbed up against one another, and every breath or gulp felt like she was swallowing razor blades.

She sat up anyway, careful of the short chain attaching her to the ground, clenching her teeth so that her cry of pain came out as a whimper instead. She was right where they had left her, up against the wall of her cell. Her sleep had been plagued with nightmares again, old ones and new. They faded as she sat there, resisting the urge to shake her head, but the memories of the pain of burned flesh, broken limbs and gouged eyes remained.

She heard a chuckle by the cell bars and, looking over, she saw a guard standing there with a smug expression on his face. It was, she realised, the same pony who had been there when she had first awoken in her dingy little cell with it cursed collar and rough straw. Inwardly, she was pouting a little, much like Rarity at the indecency of it all, but outwardly she tried to keep her calm, superior facade.

Considering she couldn’t sit up straight, and her coat was mangy and unwashed, covered with dirt while her mane hung in knotted clumps over her face, she didn’t think she came across as very superior.

The guard smirked at her and opened the bars just enough to slide through a bowl containing some sort of mushy meal over to Twilight’s hunched form, half of which spilled onto the floor before it reached her. He said nothing as he lowered the bars again and walked away.

Twilight pointedly ignored the food until the sound of the door slamming shut echoed down the hall. As soon as the guard was outside, however, she dropped to the floor and stuffed her face into the bowl. Her stomach growled even then, and she was careful not to spill any more onto the ground. It was some sort of oatmeal porridge, mushy and tasteless, but not a scrap was left in the bowl when Twilight was done. She even eyed the lumps that had fallen onto the ground, but they were already laced with dirt and she wasn’t that hungry.

Another painful growl of her stomach told her that she was close to being that hungry, but she refused to dive to such depths just yet. She still had some of her dignity left, though her appetite was screaming at her to throw it away completely.

Twilight waited for the guard, or Flim and Flam, or anyone really, to come for her that day, but nopony did. She shuffled around at the extent of the chain’s length, moving from one position to the next, trying to get comfortable and she heard not a peep from the outside world.

Her cuts were still hurting: the pain had dulled little throughout the day. It wasn’t until the light coming in through the small window was the deep orange of sunset and her stomach was once again growling and aching with hunger, that she heard the prison door open.

She immediately assumed a posture that she had been practicing, sitting with her head held as high as she could with her back as straight as the chain would allow. She adopted an empirically bored expression that a Princess might wear if her patience were being tried, and waited.

She did not have to wait long: soon enough Flim and Flam appeared at the bars to her cell. They both wore their ever-present vests, straw hats and matching smiles, and Twilight was struck with just how much she hated these ponies. It was a new feeling for her.

True, she had had unpleasant feelings about ponies in the past, like Prince Blueblood or Trixie, before her reformation, but she had never really hated anyone before. But now, here she was looking at these two flashy, show-off demons and she knew that she detested them both down to pits of her soul.

How dare they do this to her, a Princess of Equestria, an ex-student of Princess Celestia herself, and a fellow pony. How dare they chain her to the ground, how dare they cut her off from her magic, how dare they torture her, cutting her flesh until she was sobbing. How dare they-

Her mental tirade was struck short as Flim sparked up his horn and shot a lance of white hot pain through Twilight’s skull. This only made her hate him more, and her expression must have showed it because another bolt of pain followed closely after that nearly dropped her to the floor.

She sat, front legs crouched, panting while she stared at the ground, trying to get her emotions under control. It would do her no good to suffer more of this pain than she had to. She almost lost her hard-won cool when the brothers chuckled. Looking up, she saw them sharing a slightly wicked grin with each other.

“We’re making progress,” Flim said to Flam.

“Indeed we are,” Flam replied.

“Making progress on what?” Twilight demanded, her voice shakier and not quite as strong as she would have liked, but the only reply she received was another shot of fire through her head, again almost dropping her to the floor.

She barely had time to clear her head and blink her vision clear of the red haze when she was being forcefully hauled to her hooves and dragged out of her cell. She tried to see where they were going, to at least give her a sense of direction, but her vision was still blurred and her mind fuzzy, and before she knew it she was being strapped back onto the icy concrete slab, belly down this time. Her hooved were tied in much the same manner as before, her forelegs out to the side, and her rear legs strapped together, directly down. Her head was tied with her chin flat to the slab.

She heard her captors conversing for a time, in quiet tones that she couldn’t hear, then one of them departed and the door slammed. Flim then appeared in her view, restricted as it was, with a devilish grin on his face. Then, he levitated a very large, very sharp-looking knife in front of her face, and his grin only grew as her eyes widened and she gasped.

“Oh, don’t worry Twilight Sparkle,” he crooned. “This knife is not for your flesh.”

This brought her some comfort, but sparked the question as to what the knife was for. Her stress only grew as Flim moved back out of her view and she heard his hoofsteps echoing from behind her. Her frantic brain was just running over the horrifying possibilities of what he could be planning when his steps stopped. Heart beating fast, mind spinning with terrible ideas, Twilight waited.

Suddenly, Flim seized her tail, either by magic or his hoof, Twilight couldn’t tell, and used the knife to shear it off, right at her flank.

Her heart froze, her breathing stopped and she felt her soul shatter. She could almost sense the strands of hair falling to the ground, despite the fact that she couldn’t even see them. She barely even felt the pain of the nerve endings in the base of her tail being cut.

The distant, analytical part of her mind quietly reminded her that a pony’s tail can grow back, as luscious as ever, if cut over two or three hoof-lengths from the base, but if the nerves that allow a pony quite dexterous control over their tail were cut, as hers now were, the tail never grew back the same, if it grew back at all.

She slumped. Her will, her determination, her fire for resistance, drained completely from her body. In that moment, she didn’t care what else they did to her. The pain from her cuts faded, the agony her body was feeling from the severed nerves in her tail remained unnoticed by her mind. Everything faded from existence for her.

Even as Flim trotted up, the tattered remains of her beautiful tail held in his sickly green magical grasp, all she could see, all she could feel were memories, visions from the past. Her brother leaving for the military, she spent the first few nights of his absence hugging her tail, worrying about him.

Her application for Celestia’s School of Gifted Unicorns was due, and she spent the night before rocking back and forth on her bed, tail wrapped in her hooves, seeking, and finding, some comfort in the soft waves of hair.

Her father had gone to hospital, some operation he needed for something reasonably minor, but that had not stopped Twilight worrying so much she had spent the whole day and night of her father’s treatment hugging her tail and her mother for comfort.

More and more and more memories came, each and every one bringing more and more pain, her heart breaking into smaller pieces for every vision that flew by.

Huddled on a Ponyville park bench, stressing about her soon-to-be overdue friendship report to Princess Celestia, so much so that she was arguing with her reflection in a puddle, all that was stopping her from tipping over the edge was her smooth tail being held in her hooves.

Her tail had been an integral part of her continued sanity and comfort, being her friend to cuddle and cry into when her family was busy and she had no pony friends to speak of.

And now it was gone.

She didn’t even feel the pain of the lash being brought down on her back, over and over as Flim began her torture session, opening large wounds across her flanks and up her spine. She barely noticed as he doused the gashes in the acidic liquid that had made her scream and wail with agony just the day before.

After the whipping, he took that same knife to her mane, shearing it off near her scalp, letting the blue and pink strands fall to the ground, joining her tail in a growing pool of Twilight’s misery. The mane would, of course, grow back just as lustrous as ever, not containing any of the critical nerve endings that a tail had.

She didn’t feel, nor care when a guard came to haul her back to her cell, dumping her unceremoniously on her flayed back and chaining her neck to the wall once more. The derisive laugh the Unicorn gave her barely even registered.

Her tail was gone. There’s nothing more they can do to me, she thought.

She had never in her life been so wrong.

~~~~~~~~~~

The days passed in a blur: time had no meaning. Every so often, as the sunlight coming in her window began to turn a deep orange or red, denoting the fading of the day, either Flim or Flam would come for her, alternating which pony came each day. They would grin and laugh, sometimes spit at her or on her, and drag her off to the windowless room with all its tools of horror and pain.

Then they would ply them to her, cutting her skin with knives or flaying her with whips and lashes. They bruised her with clubs, hammers, or even their own hooves, sometimes breaking bones that would mysteriously heal overnight. They sprayed her cuts with antiseptic, each application feeling like acid burning into her skin.

And she would scream. She would scream and wail until her throat was raw and bleeding, then she would scream even more. She pleaded to them, begged them to stop, to give her a reprieve, but her desperation fell on deaf ears. Her will swiftly broke and she swore she’d tell them everything she knew, but the only response she got was that they wanted nothing from her. Eventually, she began pleading for death, that sweet, final release from the everlasting agony her life had become, and they even denied her that.

And every night, the nightmares would come. Dreams of her flesh melting from her bones, or her skin being peeled off strip by strip. Visions of her bones being snapped, slowly and thoroughly until she was nothing but a twisted pile of refuse, still alive, lying on the floor. Dreams of all other manner of horrific experiences that left a lingering agony with her when she awoke. The part of her mind that believed that dreams couldn’t hurt her had long since died, but all the pain just made the void inside her grow.

She became empty. She became hollow. There was nothing for her in life but misery and pain. Eventually, memories of the time before the pain began to fade. She knew she had friends. What were their names? She thought there used to be four of them. Or was it five? Had she been friends with the sun and the moon? That was what her fragmented memories were trying to tell her, but how could that be? All the sun and moon seemed to do was torment her further with brief light shining in her tiny window, promising a freedom that never came.

There had also been a companion. A phoenix? No, that didn’t sound right. A dragon? Yes, that sounded better. Her mind clung to that thought with a fierceness that surprised her. Why was this dragon so important to her? A voice inside her head was shouting, screaming at her that she was forgetting something, so very important that it should never have slipped her mind. The sound was almost lost in the overwhelming agony that occupied and dominated her mind., but still the thought remained, a small twitter of life in the roar of pain and desire for death. Why was a small dragon so important?

“She’s been losing herself, brother.”

Voices. Those same, cursed voices that had visited her every day for the last eternity. They brought the pain, they were avatars for the god of agony and torment that had seen fit to visit its wrath upon her.

“Who cares? She’s just another pitiful experiment, a meaningless pastime to occupy a casual afternoon.”

The voices signified another session of meaningless, mindless pain. It was odd for her to hear them both at the same time though. Usually, they visited her one at a time, each having their share of her torment, before the next day, when the other took over.

The variance sparked a little of the life she had forgotten she possessed and she lifted her head, still bare of a mane and bearing a precise set of scars, matching the entire host that decorated the rest of her body. She studied the two and noticed a distinct, and previously absent, difference in them.

Whilst before, they had been almost identical in manner, holding themselves in mirrored, cock-sure posture with matching grins and flourishes, something had changed. Flam was far more subdued, a hollow, sunken look in his eyes and his posture was not at all the arrogant performer who had kidnapped her , all that time ago. Something had been eating away at his conscience and it was beginning to show. The analytical part of her mind that, up until this point, had been quiet, put forth the recollection that Flam had hesitated during his first session with her. That part of her mind was also convinced that that event and the pony’s change in stature were related, but Twilight couldn’t bring herself to care.

Flim, on the other hoof, seemed to be more flamboyant than ever but, upon closer inspection, his demeanour had changed slightly too. His posture was stiff, as if every muscle was tensed at every moment and his grin was too wide, seeming to stretch his face, but not reach his eyes. Something had snapped in his head, and part of him had disappeared. She did vaguely remember her sessions with him being far more unpleasant. She also remembered his laughter, crazed as he sliced her flesh or flayed it from her back, or any of the other inequanities he had forced upon her.

“She’s important!” Flam protested. “We still need her, for so many things. We cannot afford to lose her.”

Flim rolled his eyes at the emphasis, but nodded. “Fine, brother. I still don’t see why it matters. Let’s get to work.” He said this last with menace enough to send a fearful shiver down Twilight’s spine.

They lowered the bars and roughly dragged her to her hooves, removing the collar in the process. They weren’t gentle, not caring how many of her cuts and bruises they agitated.

“We’ve got a surprise for you today, Princess,” Flim jeered, clearly taking obscene pleasure in the thought of what they were going to do to her next. It was something outside the normal routine, she was sure, though her mind hadn’t cleared much and her thoughts were still slow.

She was slung over their shoulders as they dragged her out of her cell and down the hall. They reached the exit, slung it open, and before she could protest, they threw her off the edge.

She was too sore and tired to scream and her thoughts were so foggy, she barely had time to register alarm before she slammed into something hard and metallic. She was definitely bruised, but the fall wasn’t far, so she didn’t think anything was broken. The pain was a dull throb through her chest and withers, but it barely registered in her conscious mind. It was nothing compared to the pain they had put her through up until that point.

They appeared in twin flashes of green magic as she was unenthusiastically dragging herself to her hooves. They finished the job quickly and roughly before dragging her inside the archway that led out to the ledge, which was just a slab of metal jutting out from the cliffside.

Inside the cave - for it was a cave, naturally eroded, not manually excavated - was a huge open expanse of empty space. The only contents were were a barrier of steel bars spanning the entire length of the cavern, and the sleeping baby dragon they detained.

Twilight was in action immediately, sprinting for the bars before her mind could catch up. She suddenly saw nothing but dirt, and a blinding pain in her right foreleg drew her eyes, and she saw it was twisted at a sickening angle. She must have landed on it after the fall, breaking it just below her knee joint. She wasn’t ready for the sudden flare of pain it brought her newly re-awakened mind and she screamed, waking the small drake on the other side of the cavern.

“Whuh, what was that? Twilight?”

Twilight watched as he rolled over and looked around blearily, a look of alarm hidden behind layers of sleepiness, and her heart broke. He looked beaten and bruised, a black eye swelling up his face. She began crawling, her broken bone grinding with the effort.

Spike’s eyes finally focused and, upon seeing Twilight, he leapt up with a wordless shout and ran over to the bars. “Twilight! What… how… what’s going on?” He took in Twilight in all her broken entirety, soaking in the gruesome scene of her tattered mane and tail, the countless cuts and gashes, the bruises and, finally, her broken leg. He immediately had tears gushing down his face but, ever the strong little dragon, he didn’t break down.

“T-Twilight, w-what happened to you?” He took in scene of Flim and Flam standing behind her, both crazed in their own way, and recognised them immediately. “Did these two do this to you?”

Twilight crawled, lacking the energy to speak, until she was finally up at the bars. She weakly held out her hoof and Spike grabbed it immediately, careful to avoid irritating the still-open wounds on her leg.

“Spike,” Twilight finally managed to croak. “Spike, are you okay?”

Spike nodded, slightly too quickly, and puffed his chest out in an exaggerated boast of strength and well-being. The image was ruined by the tears that were still running down his face harder than ever. “Of course Twilight, I’m fine. Strong as a dragon, but what about you? What have they done to you?”

Twilight smiled weakly. The expression felt odd on her face, being the first time she had smiled in what felt like years. “That’s good.” She could tell that Spike was putting on a brave face. They had obviously treated him very roughly, but he was being strong for her. She closed her eyes and lay her head on the ground, and for a moment, she was back in the past.

She was lying on the floor in her old tree-house library, back before this whole Princess business started. She was resting her eyes for a moment after a long few hours of reading and Spike sat beside her, reading a book of his own, idly resting a friendly claw on her hoof. She could have stayed in that moment forever.

A shout from Spike and the feeling of his claw pulling away from her hoof snapped her out of her reverie, and upon opening her eyes, she saw several of the Unicornia guardsponies pulling him to the center of the cell. They then chained him there by his wrists, though the manacles were made from a dark material that seemed to glow slightly with green light and the chains were strangely long, as if made for a much larger dragon. A pony wearing a white lab coat walked in through a door in the side of the cell, levitating with him a small, open case containing a single syringe.

Twilight’s heart was already sinking rapidly, but plummeted instantly when she suddenly heard Flim’s menacing voice whisper into her ear: “time to wake up Princess.”

Spike was shouting wordlessly, struggling against his bonds which didn’t seem to budge at all, all the while shooting Twilight pleading looks. All she could do was watch as the lab pony took the syringe out of the case and, without a pause, jabbed it into Spike’s neck, quickly injecting the contents into the small drake.

Twilight jumped to her hooves, wincing at her broken leg, and rounded on Flim and Flam, who were standing behind her grinning as they always were.

“What are you doing to him? Don’t you dare hurt him!”

Flam grimaced, almost apologetically, and opened his mouth to speak, but a glare from his brother cut him off. It was Flim then, who replied instead.

“Dearest Twilight, what we are doing to him is progress. We’ve been theoretically testing a rapid growth serum for dragons that makes them more, well, obedient, and we are at the stage where we want to try it on a live specimen.” He stared at her unblinkingly, his left eye twitching slightly, daring her to speak out again.

Twilight was about to do just that and to tartarus with the ramifications, but a heart-splitting scream from Spike instantly drew her attention back to the cell.

He was hunched over on the ground, arms wrapped around himself as he shook and screamed. Twilight’s first instinct was to reach for her magic, and so she tried, but received only a bolt of white-hot fire through her head that dropped her to the floor for her efforts.

From the ground she watched her lifelong friend, as much a brother to her as Shining Armour had ever been, writhe around in agony, screaming as hard as Twilight must have during her ‘sessions’ on the concrete bench. It was from this vantage point that she saw the true effects of Flim and Flam’s vile concoction take effect.

It started slowly at first, but grew more rapid as the seconds ticked by, but Spike began to grow. It wasn’t the instant change from baby to giant that had happened when Twilight had first hatched him, nor was it similar to the crazy growth spurts he had experienced on his birthday. It was distorted, with one limb shooting out at a time, muscles bulging and claws extending. His muzzle lengthened and his teeth sharpened, while his blunt, ridged spines hardened and extended, becoming razor-sharp points all along his back and tail. His torso extended and his forearms angled forward, so that his natural standing posture would be on all fours.

Weakly, Twilight tried again to reach for her magic, only to encounter more blinding pain, but she desperately needed to help Spike. Tears streamed down her face as her head filled with molten lava as she tried yet again.

But still Spike grew. With the rapid expansion of his limbs and body, his size quickly doubled, then tripled, and soon it was difficult for Twilight’s ever-present analytical side to estimate his size. Two spots on his back bulged, before splitting open in a spray of blood as two wings erupted from the holes.

One of the last things to change was his voice and for a moment she was presented with the oddity of a baby dragon’s scream coming from a teenage-looking dragon’s mouth.

Then, Spike’s screams turned into one final plea as he desperately looked to his sister with eyes that were still his own. “Twi-li…” His scream deepened and devolved into a wordless, guttural roar as his eyes finally changed, his irises becoming slitted like that of the full-grown, greed-driven dragons. It was at that point that Twilight’s heart shattered completely and she tried to find her magic yet again, ignoring the screaming of her own mind and mouth, ignoring the tears and blood that were now streaming out of her eyes and nose. She ignored the agony of her broken leg as she dragged herself to her hooves and pounded on the bars of the cell as she once again reached for her pool of magic.

She could vaguely hear Flam screaming behind her: “you fool, she’ll kill herself, remove the block!”

All other thought left Twilight’s mind as, finally, blessedly, magic streamed through her horn once again, easing but not erasing the burning sun that had formed inside her skull as she drew as deeply on it as she could. They only gave her a trickle, but it had to be enough.

She threw a blast at the bars, strong enough to completely disintegrate a normal gateway completely, but the magic simply slid off the strange, magic-repelling metal. She tried again and again, throwing blast after blast with the same result. Her consciousness was fading, but she was lucid enough to tell her tactics weren’t working, so she tried grasping the bars in her magic instead.

Again, her magic slid off, her aura not able to get a grip on the metal. Her vision tunneled, and she barely noticed the green aura that enveloped the cell gate. All she cared was that the barrier blocking her from Spike was lowering into the ground.

Stumbling forward, barely noticing the agony of her leg, Twilight approached the dragon in the middle of the room. He had stopped roaring at this point, and simply lay there breathing heavily, staring at her with one very large, very draconian eye.

There was nothing left there of the kind, caring Spike who baked cupcakes and wore pink aprons with hearts on the front. Gone from those eyes was the brother who she had grown up with, who had become her number one assistant, who had helped her study or slept beside her as she read. Gone was the baby dragon who blushed at compliments and had crazy crushes on beautiful ponies named Rarity.

Her fears were confirmed when the dragon let out a roar and lunged for her, teeth bared, mouth open, ready to swallow a broken, dirty, run-down pony whole. The sweet embrace of death evaded Twilight once again as the chains snapped taut, bringing the creature that used to be Spike to a sudden stop inches from her face.

He roared again and, rearing back onto his back legs, raising his head to the roof, let out a torrent of brilliant green fire that completely filled the expanse of the cave. The fire almost blended into the sickly green of the magical shield that had been cast around her moments before. Spike’s roar wavered, and so did his fire as his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he fell backwards onto the ground. Passed out or dead, Twilight didn’t know.

From one side of her, Flim or Flam, Twilight couldn’t tell which, tsked. “Well, that was an entire science team wasted. Though I suppose we predicted that this might happen.”

“Indeed brother. This is rather promising,” came the reply from her other side.

It was then that Twilight wanted to lose her grip on the world and slide into the warm embrace of sleep and the blackness that lurked beyond, but even that was denied her as a familiar, sickly-sweet scent filled her nose and reawakened her senses.

“No sleep for you just yet, Twilight Sparkle,” Flam said, putting the stopper back in his jar of accursed smelling salts. “Sleeping for you now would likely mean death, and we can’t afford to lose you.”

Despite the enchantment in the salt keeping her awake, Twilight’s sense of the world became blurred and she barely noticed being hauled onto the back of an armoured pony and carted back to her cell. She was unceremoniously thrown to the floor again, the keen pain in her broken leg causing her mind to sharpen once more and she screamed out, but the cry fell on deaf ears as the two ponies left her cell and slid the bars back down again.

Author's Note

This chapter was hard to write, but leads into my original inspiration for this story in the first place, which is early-ish on in the next chapter. It's pretty gore heavy and is the reason I'm not expecting a great number of readers, not a huge number of people being into that kind of thing. Hope you guys enjoy, please leave your comments, particularly if you feel like downvoting, I'm always keen to know what you all think.