Waiting is excruciating.

Full of adrenaline I make an experimental shift in the bed, alive to any change in the behaviour of the somnolent stallion beside me.

Nothing.

I tremble in excitement and try to suppress the fantasy, building all day, of freedom and escape. Images of my home, my real home - on earth - flash through my head. If I get through this I must go back, to tell them all I love them... even if I want to stay here after.

I move again. And again. The spike of adrenaline when I realise that he's asleep and that I must act almost makes me gag.

I shuffle my lithe body to the edge of the bed. With my heart thudding in my ears, I commit myself. I roll away from Party Favour and off the (shoddy) bed and onto the floor. My ears twitch for any audible sign and my hind legs throb with the desire to bolt. It takes all the force of my will to steady myself.

As I stand frozen in the darkness of the Townhouse, the second phase of my plan crystalises in my mind. Leaving without being seen means leaving through the weakness in the wall of the house that I identified earlier. The street would be watched by one of the glassy eyed, breanwashed pegasi.

I try to start towards the bedroom but... I cant move! The plan I made earlier today rests at the fore of my mind... but for the first time in my life the idea of being somewhere new just doesn't grip me. The Town was horrible... and I should escape it, but the thought of finding new things, the thought which had always grounded me, been my compass in this land was simply not there. It felt like my will, my 'self ' was leaking into the shoddy straw of the cramped Town bedroom. Still frozen on the carpet I felt a lethargy that I had never felt anywhere in Equestria creep into me. I looked towards the bed, and the peaceful stallion on it... wouldn't it be nice to go back to bed?

I shake my head to clear it. I forced myself to rationalise. I needed to escape because I would be repeatedly abused here, because they didn't understand me, because I hated them... As I intoned the reasons, almost as if in response to my mental effort, my sluggish limbs began to move, as if propelled by some external force. The feeling that it would be nice to stay receded.

Eventually, through stuttering steps, I came to the door to the pathetically makeshift 'bedroom'. The steady breathing of the stallion indicates all the while that my 'companion' remains blissfully unaware. I thank God, Shiva, friggin celestia... any being I can think of that the momentary paralysis of will (or whatever it was) did not compromise my mission.

I slipped quickly downstairs, freed from whatever it was that froze me in the bedroom. I am soon at the weakness in the wall.I press my face against the sick sweet smelling of rotten straw. I take a deep breath and thrust with my powerful pony hind legs and force myself through the rotten straw-brick of the wall, biting down on the pain as the heavy structure presses into me. After a terrifying moment of black weight, I emerge into the empty starlight of the Town. I tell myself I am free and will myself to be be exulted... but a dull feeling in my 'soul', somehow centered on the symbol on my flanks, and a feeling of listlessness at the throught of freedom reminds me that escape from the Town is not so easy...

Author's Note

surprise ponies :3 I love that people have kept up with this. I love this story but, a bit like my main character, am paralysed. Unlike my main character I am not paralysed by being turned into a mare and used against his will but just by being a terrible author who forgets how fun it is to write stuff :P