Grinning widely, Twilight Sparkle felt a thrill of excitement shoot through her as she levitated the top off the cardboard box that had just been delivered to the Ponyville library by Derpy Hooves not five minutes earlier. The new set of advanced magical encyclopedias she had ordered had finally arrived, after more than a year of backlogging and delays. She couldn't wait to read them.
She picked up one of the thick, heavy books (the 'F' volume) hugged it to her chest, and did a little twirl on one of her back hooves; a feat that normally wouldn't have been possible without magic to keep her balanced. Laughter bubbled out of the unicorn's mouth.
It wasn't specifically the arrival of those books that had Twilight so elated, but rather her life in general. Seeing her brand-new encyclopedias triggered a flow of wonderful feelings and thoughts. Her life, she decided just then, was perfect. She had, for the first time in her life, made friends when she came to Ponyville. Celestia was right; friendship was truly magical. And she already had the greatest future imaginable: as Princess Celestia's personal student, there was no limit to the things she could do with her life.
There was a sudden knock on the door. Three, actually; three calm, measured taps of a hoof.
"Spike, get that," said Twilight absent-mindedly as she levitated more of the new books out of the crate. The knocking came again, no more insistent than the first time. "Spike!"
She looked around. The baby dragon was nowhere to be --Oh! She had forgotten he was at Rarity's boutique for the day, trying some scheme he'd cooked up with the Cutie Mark Crusaders to win his favorite mare over.
"I'm coming!" Twilight called when the pony on the other side of the door knocked a third time. Her books would have to wait. The unicorn carefully, neatly stacked the encyclopedias back in the box they had arrived in and went to the door. "Sorry about that, how can I --"
It was not, as she had thought, another pony, but by a tall bipedial creature the likes of which Twilight had never seen before. It was at least twice as tall as she was, if not more, and its forelegs each had five long, thin fingers on them. Most oddly this creature didn't have much of a face -- the place where it should have been was just a big empty green spot with the words No picture available inscribed on it. It wore a black suit and a red tie, as well as a hat, and carried a cane which seemed to be more for effect than for utility.
"Um, hi," Twilight said uncertainly to the creature when it didn't do anything for a while.
He said nothing. He merely stepped past the unicorn and into the library. After looking around, he calmly removed his hat and leaned his cane by the doorway, ignoring Twilight completely.
"Excuse me--" Twilight tried to get his attention so she could politely inform him that it was rude to just walk in without asking. To be fair, it was a public library, but having the door opened for you and then ignoring the pony who opened it wasn't very nice.
The Anonymous creature then shut the door and turned to face Twilight. She got the feeling he was staring at her despite having no eyes. It made her shudder, the way he seemed to gaze right through her soul.
"A-are you here to borrow a book?" she asked nervously, her voice squeaking a little. The whole situation was starting to make her uncomfortable. "This, um, this is a library... we have a lot of books... you're welcome to borrow one... if you w--gggaackk--"
Anonymous reached out and seized Twilight around the neck. He was much stronger than he looked; strong enough to raise the struggling unicorn off the floor without even bending his arm. Instinctively reacting to the attack, Twilight tried to use magic to throw Anonymous back, but the lavender aura around him did nothing. This creature was immune to magic! She tried to levitate something at him. Before she could finish the spell, the hand around her windpipe closed until she couldn't breathe at all. It only relented when her horn stopped glowing. Twilight was a quick study; she got the hint fast.
"Let me go!" she coughed, trying to pry the suited arm off her with one weak foreleg. "Who are you? Why are you doing this to me?" There was no response as Anonymous formed his hand into a fist and threw it at Twilight's midsection.
BASH!
The blow completely shattered her spinal cord. The place where Anonymous's fist struck her body radiated a kind of pain the sheltered Twilight had never felt before, while everything below her waist went completely numb. She didn't feel her destroyed bowels voiding themselves onto the floor, or the warm fluid trickling down her legs. Her injured stomach spasmed, sending a mixture of partially digested hay fries, blood, and stomach juice spilling out her mouth. The disoriented unicorn coughed as soon as she was able, trying to clear the remnants of her disgorge from her throat so she could breathe.
Suddenly the hand around her throat released her. Twilight fell to the floor, dually thanking Celestia for her freedom and staring in horror at the enormous reddish-purple bruise spreading over her abdomen. Then something yanked hard on her mane and she rose into the air again. Meanwhile, Anonymous was glaring at his hand, on which some of Twilight's bloody vomit had landed. Though he had no face, Twilight could feel the waves of revulsion and disgust rolling off him. That revulsion and disgust quickly turned to rage, and with it his nonexistent eyes turned to her, burning with an invisible flame of hatred.
"I'm sorry!" the unicorn bawled as Anonymous jerked her head hard, nearly snapping her neck from the whiplash. "Don't do this! Aauugh! It hurts!"
Ignoring her pleas, the suited green man hurled Twilight across the library. She spun through the air a few times and crashed onto the floor with enough force to knock all the air out of her. Sobbing, she tried to get up, but the damage to her lower body had rendered that impossible.
Anonymous was on top of her before she knew it, sitting on her chest, crushing her lungs, making it almost impossible to breathe. The faceless man seemed to be grinning at her now; a malevolent smile that said exactly how much he was enjoying hurting her. It was then that Twilight at last realized that she might die. The thought had not occurred to her until that point, as she wasn't accustomed to death or real danger.
"P-Princess Celestia! Oh, please help me!" she sobbed hoarsely as Anonymous loomed over her. "Dash! Applejack! Anypony... please... I don't want to die... I don't want to die..."
The unicorn's tears seemed to galvanize Anonymous into action. He raised his arm again, his fingers closing into a fist. This time, it was aimed right at Twilight's face. The unicorn was able to utter a strangled, desperate cry of "Oh god please no--" before the blow connected with the side of her face.
Intense pain erupted there as the skin quickly darkened. The whole left side of Twilight's face was an ugly mess of bruises and blood when the fist was gone; it was amazing how fast her injuries swelled up until she could barely see out of her left eye. It was the first time Twilight had actually really felt her injuries, since Anonymous's first assault had crushed her spine and left her lower half numb. The sheltered unicorn had never even experienced real pain in her life -- not even a broken bone or a toothache. Consequently the onslaught of agony was just too much for her to process all at once, and in her shock she didn't show much of a reaction before Anonymous hit her again.
The second blow came as an uppercut to her chin. Twilight bit right through the tip of her tongue this time, as it had accidentally been trapped between her top and bottom teeth. Choking, she instinctively spat out the piece of flesh, along with a spray of red. Anonymous's fist came down on the top of Twilight's head, just behind her horn. It elicited only a disoriented squeak from the unicorn as a torrent of blood exploded out of her nose and a few of her teeth broke.
Ears still ringing and teeth still rattling from the force of the last blow, the concussed unicorn almost didn't see Anonymous's left fist coming at her. It struck the right side of her face so hard that it left an indent in her cheek when it came away. Mindlessly feeling around with her mutilated tongue, Twilight found a couple of foreign objects in her mouth amidst all the blood. She turned her head to the side and weakly spat out the teeth Anonymous had knocked loose.
Anonymous rose, leaving the battered unicorn in a pool of her own blood and bodily fluids. Twilight was shaking badly from the shock of what had just happened to her. Every few breaths she took there was a short punctuation where she tried to empty her mouth of the continuously flowing blood. Using her horn was beyond her now; Princess Celestia's personal protege had been reduced to a blubbering wreck who couldn't even curl up into a fetal position.
"It huwths..." she whimpered, her speech impeded by the damage to her mouth. She coughed a gurgling, bloody cough. "Someone please help..."
A raw scream emerged from her throat as her left foreleg seemed to explode. Anonymous stomped on it a second time with his expensive business shoe, resulting in a heavy cracking sound and another scream from Twilight. A third time, and a fourth, and a fifth, and then he knelt down and grasped the broken leg in his hand. His other hand wrapped around Twilight's throat again, causing her to choke and cough up more blood, which bubbled out in the form of a red froth. Twilight tried to speak to him; to ask what she had done to deserve what was happening to her; but her words were utterly incomprehensible with Anonymous's hand nearly strangling her.
Anonymous, ignoring Twilight's babbling, began pulling on the foreleg he had broken. It was like pulling out the arm of a stuffed doll in that the foreleg slowly stretched, and then the skin began to rip at the seams and reveal the muscle beneath. The green-faced man kept pulling, and it wasn't long before the muscle began to tear as well.
A huge red bubble burst around Twilight's split lips as she screamed and sobbed like a little foal having a nightmare. "No no no no stop! Mommy! Daddy! I wanna go home! Princess! Please! Please, don't leave me--"
She let out a sudden, unnaturally high screech when her foreleg came loose. Blood erupted out of the stump like a geyser. As if in a dream, she watched Anonymous carelessly toss her severed limb across the room. Twilight's eyes followed it, her disoriented brain barely recognizing and not really processing that it was her own. She turned her crushed head to the door and made a desperate plea toward it.
"Princess... oh, please come take me away..."
Anonymous took hold of her other foreleg, the one he hadn't broken, and began to pull at that as well. His other hand, now pressing against Twilight's throat, cut the unicorn's air off completely. At first, she tried desperately to breathe, but there was no fighting against him anymore.
She was powerless. There was no great white alicorn there to save her. Princess Celestia had not come. Her mentor had not come. God had not come. She was alone.
A strange calm washed over Twilight, even as the room began to swim before her eyes. She stopped fighting against Anonymous's hand.
Let it all end... she thought, finally giving in to the despair. She couldn't bear it anymore. Let the hurting stop…
Tears trickled down her destroyed cheeks, but they weren't just tears of pain anymore; they were tears of shame. The ruined unicorn thought of her mentor, and how disappointed she would be if she knew Twilight had just given up.
Forgive me, Princess... I'm so sorry…
With a sick ripping sound, Twilight's other foreleg came out of its socket. No longer needing to hold onto her to balance himself, Anonymous loosened his grip on her throat, allowing her a ragged gasp at the worst pain she'd ever felt in her life. Twilight tried to scream, failed, then puked out the half-clotted blood that had collected in her mouth before trying again.
"Make it stop!" she begged Anonymous desperately. "Kill me! Kill me now! Please, I-I just want to stop hurting!"
Yet again, though he had no face, Anonymous seemed to fix Twilight with a sick leer. He threw her foreleg over by the other one and loomed over her. Twilight was too far gone to do anything but scream at him and cry.
"DO IT!" the unicorn sobbed. "JUST DO IT!"
Those were the last words she said before Anonymous's fist impacted her face with obscene force, crushing her muzzle into her skull. Twilight’s vision skewed bizarrely into two different pictures as her eyeballs were forced out of her head by the pressure. Time slowed down to a crawl, and she saw flashes of her life pass through her mind.
She remembered the examination for Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. It was a strangely distorted memory, as though worn down by time. That had been the start of what she knew was the most wonderful life a unicorn could ever have lived. The overwhelming joy she’d felt when Princess Celestia stood there in the examination room and told her she wanted to make Twilight her personal student was still imprinted on the unicorn’s mind, even after so many years.
Other memories came back to her--the first time she’d met her closest friends; the adventures they had gone on together. Had she been capable of reacting to the blur of information in such a short moment, she would have wished she could have said a proper goodbye to them before she died, and hoped Anonymous didn’t go after any of them. Had she been able, she might have wished she could see her B.B.B.F.F one last time, as well as her parents. She would have been afraid for Spike, who would have come back and found either a horrid mess of blood and waste, a corpse, or Anonymous waiting to harm him. She would have wished the last thing she said to him had been more affectionate than ‘Don’t forget, it’s reshelving day, so be back by three!’.
More than anything, she would have wished she’d had time to write a letter summarizing all her experiences with the magic of friendship and send it to Princess Celestia before she died, as she’d been hoping to do when she neared the end of her life. It had been such a magical journey, and she had wanted somepony to know, if only secondhand, how wonderful it had been when she was no longer there to remember anymore.
At that point, Twilight’s thoughts began to get less coherent as her brain deformed and bits of it were expelled through the new fissures in her skull. She thought of Anonymous, and of the last two minutes of her life. The poor unicorn still didn’t understand, and never would understand, what she had done to deserve such a brutal death. It wasn’t in her nature to be cruel or even rude to others, at least on purpose. All Twilight ever wanted to do was learn and make friends.
The very last memory she experienced was just a flash of some contextless gathering with her best friends on a green, grassy hill, under the sun which hung in a clear blue sky. Pinkie Pie was unpacking a basket full of picnic food, while Applejack eyed an apple pie she’d already laid out. Rarity was trying to find somewhere to sit that wouldn’t leave grass stains on her coat. Fluttershy and a butterfly were conversing to the side, and Rainbow Dash was behind them, doing aerial stunts over the nearby meadow. And she, Twilight, was smiling at them, knowing they would always be friends forev--
The rest of this never even finished forming in Twilight’s mind, because her brain was simply too damaged to think thoughts anymore; even involuntary ones.
When Anonymous moved his hand away, what remained could barely have been identified as a unicorn had it not been for the horn jutting out above her caved-in face. The suited green man shot a nonexistent yet somehow also disgusted look at the blood on his fingers, then wiped some of the blood away on the carpet.
Amazingly, Twilight’s left eye continued to blink, though it was too rapid a movement to be natural. Her body tensed and relaxed a few times, twitching and seizing up, and her horn began to glow faintly. Though she was no longer aware of anything, her body still instinctively tried to save itself with magic in spite of the massive, irreversible damage. But there was no fixing the injuries Anonymous had inflicted on her; not even with magic. It wasn't long before the futile, weak, primitive healing spell failed completely and her horn went dark forever.
Anonymous, after standing and staring at Twilight’s mutilated body for a minute or so, left the dead unicorn where she was, not bothering to cover her up or anything else respectful like that--he was Anonymous, and he did not do respectful if respectful wasn’t inappropriate for the situation. He went into the bathroom and washed his hands, and then he retrieved his hat and cane from the doorway and left the library, twirling his cane and whistling contentedly to himself.
Yes, he was very satisfied indeed.
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