Chrysalis: Illness of the Heart

A breeze dances- a cool ribbon, a snaking rarity, in the night air. Dipping and diving in midair, it plays across a narrow muzzle, and whistles a delicate melody within the velvet hollows of perked ears, just as dark as the night sky.

If one were to strain their own ears, only ever so slightly, they would hear the muted throbbing of a heart.

A heart breaking, throbbing, pulsing, convulsing within the confines of a hollow black chest. Its dark red walls, electric with pain, pushing insistently against a frail cage of skeleton's fingers, willing them to break. Swivelling ears latch onto the deep groan of a bass drum echoing against waxy chitin walls. A hollow kathump, kathump, kathump, that challenges the stern silence of an aching mind. The sound reaches out with desperate fingers and leaks from the peeling, cavernous holes and escaping into the night, dying in the evening air like a grown mare's dreams.

Some things must be forgotten. Swallowed, to feed the rampant jealousy sweeping through every fiber of the body, killing everything it touches like a wild fire. Spreading like a vine, leaping like a tiger, alive and dead, and evil and hopeful and curious. Consuming everything, ebbing like the stars burning in the sky. Just like the heat of this jealousy burns the holes in my flesh, squeezes my sickly green pupils unto narrow talons. This burning jealousy, building in my core, and thickening this armor that wraps around my body. I'm hard as diamonds now, but everytime I look into a mirror, my eyes are assaulted with a mare just as black as diamonds are white.

It wasn't always this way.

I wasn't always this way.

Slowly, face still as an ebony statue, the reflection lifts a worm-eaten front leg. As the cool flat of my hoof traces against the smooth flesh on my cheeks, I remembered the texture of fur- the texture of short, soft fur rubbing against short, soft fur. Suddenly the scraping of hard chitin against the armor covering my cheekbones feels foreign and uncomfortable. My wide green eyes stare at their twins within the mirror, and remember a time when the mirror's eyes were cornflower blue. Blue, like a sun faded picnic blanket, or the sky during the quaint summer mornings I used to enjoy from a bed of downy clouds. The assaulting green of my new eyes, my current eyes, ate the pleasant memories away like battery acid. I tried to hold onto them but they were gone, fading away, like the outcries of my changeling heart.

Oh Sweet, Sick Celestia... will this sickness ever release me? Will I ever escape the flames of my jealousy?

Once again, the breeze snakes into my ears, stroking the only soft flesh that this sickness had left untouched, caressing me as if I was an old friend. This time, the words it whispers are not secrets at all.

Ashes tossed to the wind cannot become whole again... no, my child, no.