Dark Arts and Kind Hearts

Drip. Drip. Drip, pattered the beads of crimson as they dribbled into the bucket beneath her—falling, then bursting, like the overripe red oranges of autumn's bounty that had been forsaken by the harvest. Drip. Drip. Drip. It continued, from the countless lacerations crisscrossing her face and body, some of which were so deep bits of brown bone could be seen peaking out from between the weeping rents in her sinew. Abandoned by her senses, however, she could not feel the countless lashes and slashes striping her flesh. Even the raw, red ruin at the end of her maimed arm felt cold and bereft of all sensation. After Betha had dismembered her, she seared the bloody stump with a red hot brand and bound it in a rough cloth to staunch the bleeding, but now a foul-smelling secretion was beginning to ooze from the crude, makeshift bandages. She could not even feel the cold, cruel bite of the steel hook from which she was suspended. Cold, dying and trembling, rasping breaths and an occasional flutter of her eyelids were the only signifiers betraying that she still clung to some dwindling modicum of life, but even that little bit of what she had left was quickly fleeting, dropping, dribbling away, her life's blood puddling into the bucket beneath her like sanguine tears. Drip. Drip. Drip.

The darkness in the tent was suddenly driven before the stark white light of the outside world when the flaps of the makeshift butchery parted, and in walked a group of silhouettes. Their features were obscured, eclipsed by the blinding daylight radiating from the ingress behind them. Starlight Glimmer didn't know or care who it was. She would probably be terrified of these unknown invaders if she still had the sense to be, would perhaps beg or blubber for mercy if she still had the strength to do so. Alas, she was capable of naught else but drooling and babbling incoherently. She had no more agency or control over her situation than that of a newborn babe. Or, to be more accurate, a calf—strung up and drained to be knackered.

The figures' voices sounded distant, echoey, even though they stood right before her. "Alive!" she thought one of them might have exclaimed. "Need emergency medi...." Starlight's eyes were very, very heavy. The things she was seeing and hearing as she clung to the fraying thread of her mortal coil played out like snippets of various film reels that had been cut and spliced together, half-lucid scenes between the gaps of darkness viewed through a blurry lens. When she regained consciousness she felt something tugging at the hook in her back. When she drifted away only to become partially sapient once more she was being spread out on the rough wooden table at the center of the butcher's tent.

"We're going to operate right here?" one voice was saying. It was distinctly male. "Doc, she needs a medivac. This is hardly a sterile environment."

"There's no time," a female voice argued. "Her chances of survival are already slim to nil."

"I'll prep the anesthesia, then."

"She's already going into shock from the blood loss; she won't need it."

"Hemorrhagic shock?" exclaimed the male voice. "Doc, her prognosis—"

"—is bad, I know. If she dies, she dies, but may Celestia herself damn me if I don't do everything I can to stop that from happening. Now, lets get a clamp on this vein. And tie off that stump, would you? Once we get her stabilized we'll have to amputate about four inches above the sever point, before the flesh begins to necrotize. Look at her, poor thing, they didn't even cauterize her properly. She's bleeding through her bandages."

Starlight was losing the tenuous grasp she had on her conciseness. Just as her vision was darkening she managed to catch a glint of a broach pinned to the white coat of the mare looking down at her ... Funny ... It looked just like the golden sun from Celestia's coat of arms.

"I don't know if you can hear me," said the mare, "but I can't promise you that you're going to pull through. What I can promise you, however, is that I'm going to do my very best to make sure you do." That was when Starlight felt a hoof caress her cheek. It was gentle, tender, warm. "I'll do everything for you that I can. All you have to do for me is stay alive, okay?"

Starlight was too weak to open her eyes, or even stay awake for much longer, but she was able to register the compassion and sincerity through the mare's touch. A single tear ran down her cheek as the shadows that had been held at bay by her sheer instinct to survive finally breeched the boarders of her consciousness, pulling, pulling, pulling her away, dragging her to the stygian void, that abyssal vacua of purgatory which straddled the line between life and death. The only question was, upon which side of the line would she be destined to fall?