Malignancy

--Royal Equestrian Post and Telegraph Service--

TO: Sr. Constable Lyra Heartstrings, Dolphin Hotel, Rm 636 13th Street
FROM: Sr. Constable Easterly Gale, 7th Ave. Royal P&T Office
SENT: SEP21 988, 16:10

"LYRA AND DENNY -(STOP)- SWIFTY RECOVERING FROM WOUNDS IN HOSPITAL -(STOP)- 53 W 23RD STREET MANEHATTAN GENERAL -(STOP)- COME AT ONCE -(STOP)- YOU OWE US"

Part 1:
Alive

Unknown,
Thursday Afternoon (September 21st, Anno Domina 988):

Breathing hurt. Her eyes burned. The darkness hurt, drilling back into her skull. Lights played on the inside of her eyelids. The weight in her head and her chest sent shocks of pain, electric and jagged, shooting through her torso and the back of her neck. Her foreleg wouldn't stop shaking. She took a shuddering, deep breath and her lungs cracked and tore as though scraping over shattered, heated glass.

Summer Breeze whimpered and her whole body began to shake. She couldn't feel her wings.

When Summer was a little filly, and her older brother was home from the Academy for the Summer Sun Celebration, her whole family had gone to the White Tail Woods for a picnic. It was the last time they were all together. Exploring by the tree line, Summer had found a black mass by the base of a tree. A single patch of white bones protruded from the blackened, rotting pelt of the dead possum. It was the first time she had seen death.

For years afterwards, the memory of the fleshy, tube-like tail and it's peeling skin returned to her. Whether she was stressing over an impending school exam, waiting to hear back from the doctors regarding her mother's illness, the image came to her mind, the smell of rotting, rancid, black and peeling flesh wafted up from the depths of her memory. The night they burned her mother on the funerary pyre. The day before her graduation. The day her brother came back from overseas missing a leg. She recalled the rotting dead thing, squirming with fat, white and red maggots, no head, stripped of everything that separated living things from objects.

The memory returned to her now. But the smell, she realized, was not some half recalled memory, it was pungent and real.

Her eyes cracked open. Another breath inflated her lungs – a tearing pain as if they were full of needles and glass. Her head was pounding, heavy, floating, sharp. She couldn't feel her wings.

She groaned, the pain shooting through her jaw and neck. Her foreleg kept shaking. Sharp pain returned to her tail and she realized she had been lying on it. She struggled to pull it out from under her. The effort pressed the side of her face harder against the muddy ground, getting filth in her eye. Had she fallen? Had she been asleep? Had she been drunk? Had she hit her head?

Her head throbbed. Breathing hurt. Her one open eye was coming into focus. A light, cold and blue. Dark walls and shadows. She tried to lift her head. There was a metallic clinking sound. She put her head back down, in the mud. She was lying in mud. Her eye focused enough to see the source of light - a dim crystal embedded in the wall. The light caused jagged, angular shadows to flicker and dance across the rough, wet walls and ceiling.

She tried again to lift her heavy head. The sound of metal, the weight of a collar over her neck and throat. She blinked her other eye, the mud stinging. She focused on another shape nearby. A dark green shape, another pony, lying in the mud, a metal collar around its neck. A stallion, chained - leashed - to the wall with heavy chain. He looked back in her direction. His breathing was laboured and irregular, and shook his whole body with the effort. His head swayed, unsteady on his neck. His expression was desolate. His mane hung limp and stringy. His coat was falling out in patches. As Summer's eyes came into sharper focus, she could see the sores covering his body, how one of his eyes was swollen shut. She could see clearly the wriggling, fat tails of worms waving from the sores in his skin, burrowing into him. She could see the stubs on his back where his wings had been hacked off.

She couldn't feel her wings.

Sharp, tearing, unbidden breathing overwhelmed her. She couldn't get enough air. She coughed and strained against her unresponsive body. She looked down at her shaking left foreleg - it wouldn't stop shaking. She looked at the worms burrowing into the sores on her trembling, spasming leg, wiggling their red and beige bodies at her. She screamed and her lungs burned, crushing her chest in on itself.

The screaming consumed her.