Reforming Spell

I curled up and cried, wrapping my feathery wings around myself. I wasn’t a magical construct at all. My life wasn’t a simple matter of following Cloud Kicker’s orders and enjoying myself in carnal pleasures. I was a real pony, with responsibilities and friends and consequences to my actions, and it was just too much to take in all at once without screaming in anguish.

“What did you do to her?!” Cloud Kicker asked.

“I don’t know!” Lyra said.

Not Lyra. A Lyra-clone. A crazy psycho Lyra clone who’d already killed dozens of ponies, because even if the clones weren’t really the ponies they looked like, they were flesh and blood and had a mind and a spirit and what else do you want? And meanwhile, Twilight and the other two surviving clones were back in Ponyville talking about the magical theory behind the pool, planning to go make a clone at sunset, which was hours and hours from now.

“None of the others reacted this way,” not-Lyra said. “Maybe it’s because she looks like you?”

“No,” I said, my eyes still squinted shut from the tears. “It’s because I’m the real one, and it’s going to be so much work. I thought I could just exist as Cloud Kicker’s plaything, and that would be so much simpler…”

“The real what?” Cloud Kicker asked.

“I’m the real Lyra,” I said, rolling onto my belly and turning my head to face her. “So I can’t be your sex slave. I have to go home and somehow tell Bon Bon about all this, and explain why I’m apparently a pegasus now… oh this is awful! I don’t know the first thing about being a pegasus! How can I even play a lyre without magic? I know they were designed to be played with your wings but I never had the right sort of wings to try that, even as a batpony!”

“I’m lost,” Cloud Kicker said. “I think I’m going to head home, and you two can sort this out. If either one of you wants to be my sex slave, even if it’s just for the night or whatever, well – you know where to find me.” She grinned.

I smiled back, weakly, and she flew off.

“You’re right,” not-Lyra said. “This is terrible. I can’t be a pegasus. You should just… leave town. I’ll tell Twilight I’m the real Lyra, and take over for you. She used a Reforming Spell to give me the right personality and everything –“

“You’re a crazy psycho,” I reminded her.

“I haven’t killed anypony real!” she protested. “The constructs don’t count!”

“I don’t understand why you would think that,” I said. “I was talking with the demon in the well about what exactly it was, and it’s not really a demon at all. It’s just an amalgam of all the ponies that were absorbed into the well, and stayed there too long to retain their own identity. When the gate opens, one of them leaves for a while. Sometimes they never come back. There’s no time limit.”

“But they’re just fakes,” not-Lyra said. “Copies.”

I shook my head. “Even if they were, you shouldn’t kill them!”

“I didn’t have any choice! The dragons would have killed us all!”

“No, they would have killed you first, and most of the clones would have gotten away,” I said. “But that’s not even who I’m thinking of. It was the first clone you made. The one you murdered. Yes, there was a dream where I thought about doing something crazy like that to a magical construct because she ‘wasn’t a pony’, but I didn’t follow through on it, and I certainly didn’t enjoy it! Twilight tried to make you into a replacement for me, but she goofed.”

“Shut up!” she said, standing up and glaring at me.

“You know I’m right,” I said. “I’m just repeating back the things that you already thought. I have your memories, remember? I know that you know that you’re broken.”

“Stop. Talking.” Her horn lit up, and I wondered what she was going to try to shoot at me. She didn’t know the spell to send ponies into the mirror pool, and I wasn’t really a strong enough caster to do anything else effective.

Also, everypony knows that you don’t try to cast on a hostile target inside twenty feet. They can just jump on you and whack your horn, and not only will you lose the spell, you’ll get a really nasty headache and not be able to cast for a while. I guess she just wasn’t thinking. She certainly wasn’t thinking anything coherent after I jumped on her and whacked her horn.

I pinned her down, and we wrestled for a bit. I was hoping that I could hold her down until she calmed down enough that we could go talk to Twilight and sort this all out without any more drama. I’d had my cry, and she’d had her temper tantrum, so we should all be able to talk this out like competent adults.

Unfortunately, she was trying to kill me, and we weren’t really very good at wrestling – Luna had mostly had us learn weapon attacks, and a bit of hoof to hoof, in the short time that we’d spent in her Guard. In Cloud Kicker’s toned weather-pony pegasus body, I was a lot stronger than she was in her layabout unicorn body, but I didn’t know how to keep her pinned, so she kept breaking free and trying to kill me, and I’d have to stop her and hold her down and pin her again, and it was getting tiring.

“Please, calm down!” I panted, as she squirmed out of my grip again.

“Die, you self-righteous nag!” she screamed at me, and head-butted me in the chin.

With her horn. It tore through the base of my jaw and shattered a bunch of teeth, and the pain was enough to make me gurgle out a scream and let go of her… and while I was trying to get ahold of myself she kicked me in the face, making it all hurt twice as much, and then reared up and stomped on my head. There was a crunch, and a moment of confusion…

…and then I woke up in my living room, sprawled out on the floor next to the discarded bits of my Night Guard armor. Back in my own body – my real body, freed from concept space when the bat-pony transformation was finally cancelled by my death.

Bon Bon was sitting on the couch, staring at me. She was not amused.