Author's Note

The son of a hangman will play with ropes and dream of the day he will have a scaffold of his own to tend. But let him drink too deep of love and he will only stroke the hemp and cry that he is a man.

(Calvin Miller, The Song)

Absolution

I, Celestia, write this in my own power and seal it with my own personal seals. Beware, intruder, and know that this document is sealed and warded against eyes not my own. Any attempt to break the seals will alert me. Any attempt to otherwise divine the contents of the attached account will alert me. If you have taken this by force or chance, return it now and I will give you grace and mercy. Curiosity is not a sin, but intrusion is against the laws of Our realm.

So signed, in the first year of my Sister’s return,

Celestia Songbourne

This is an account of my foray into the Everfree Forest in response to my student’s encounter with several humans, the rest of which is also sealed but untouched by my personal magicks. I’ve made little effort to change or edit the manuscripts produced by my student, nor of the written out record of one human’s logs. I have preserved them all as an account to the darkness I found. I write this for myself, yes, but also for Twilight and others. It may be soon that we shall need to see this all in full again. And even if that day does not come… I believe that something of it should be preserved. Much has been said or done. Perhaps I too must give an account of myself, even if only to myself.

I first encountered the abominable lodgings of the loathsome murderer, whom the Huntress called “blackshirt” or “federal” or names too vulgar for my liking to reproduce. I do not, however, feel she was out of line in her description. The creature was vile.

I must say that humans have changed in many ways since last I walked among them and peered into their world. I begin to think that I saw humans in another plane, for these I hardly recognized. When last I left them they were refined savages feasting on olives and empire. It seems they grew in learning but not in wisdom in the meantime.

I purged his campsite. I purged every place touched by his foul aura with fire. Neccessary? No. But I did so.

And so I searched. These creatures are fast and wiley. I had forgotten that. It was surprisingly hard to find them--much more so than the Griffon warlords I have tracked down in the past. Always so loud, Griffons. Never good at dodging.

Perhaps I was out of practice. It has been ages since I last truly set out with a killing intention. I did not enjoy doing so then, and I do not enjoy it now. Even to write of it fills me with blackest disgust. Necessity is not license. It is not justification. It is only necessity.

Three humans. The murderer, the colonist, the huntress. Black, Grey, and… well.

I found the murderer first, an hour past noon. An hour and thirty-six minutes, to be precise, for the sun gives more than light. I had expected to have to run him down, and was surprised to find the grisly work done for me already.

In truth, I knew of his presence and some of his fate long before I laid eyes upon the corpse. Most talented unicorns can read the auras of their fellow beings--maybe not very well, but they can do it if they try. What most unicorns do not know is that this ability is far more nuanced and informative than merely seeing the unseen magical energies inherent in the bodies of ponies and their neighbors. Time and attention reveals smaller cues. The colors shift with the emotional state of their bearers, for instance. Pain radiates and contentment comes in small, happy waves. The strong emotions and sensations of living things sometime linger in the things they touch and the places they walk.

How many different lives I have been blessed or troubled with in this way! If Twilight is reading this, I confess that when you left my direct tutelage, I often visited your tower to feel again your excitement at some discovery or to revel in your happiness over some new assignment. I have felt the worry and the happiness of the palace servants, the pride of my guards. Even the dalliances of staff who would rather be anonymous I sometimes find lingering, though I never say anything of the matter.

But I also feel the heartaches and the agonies. The ancient battlefields were hell, but for me they were far worse. Only by a grim stoicism did I endure the borrowed agonies that pressed upon me.

So I felt the Murderer before I found him. I felt the decaying imprint of his diseased mind. It was fogged over with madness, filled with anger and lust. It had the ferocity of the Minotaur without the Minotaur’s ingenuity, and the fury of the Griffon without his honor. I cannot read minds, but often I do not need to. It is enough to feel a things strongest emotions to understand them.

What did I feel? Eagerness. A bit of frustration, but it was swallowed up in something dark and sordid I can only call a bloodlust. Experience and intuition began to paint a picture of his doings. Here he stopped, breathing in deeply perhaps, listening for the tell-tale shuffling of his quarry. What did he hunt? I had suspicions, but the traces left behind did not say before I burned them away.

Here, at a stream, he paused for a drink and then soiled the earth. Farther along, he trampled underneath his booted feet the rich blue of poison joke. They touch me but can do nothing to me--an alicorn is above most of the world’s poisons. I have sipped from wineglasses and tasted the cyanide within with senses beyond the ken of mortals and smiled over the rim at terrified wouldbe tyrannicides. Usually, such a display is enough to forestall any waste of sacred life.

And then… I found the body. Or rather, I found the pit which contained the body.

I shall describe it in detail, and beg the forgiveness of any I may choose to allow into this most careful of confidences.

His strange armor was obviously of no help. The pit itself was full of wooden spikes, and his fall had been facefirst into them. He was pierced in seven places: twice the stomach, the right shoulder, left arm below the elbow, one spike destroyed the right hand which had been put forward to break his fall, once in the right thigh and once in the left leg, slightly above the ankle. The pit stank of blood and the detritus of death, and in the warm air it would begin to decompose in earnest presently. The head was missing, and I did not think that it was taken by a spike for I found no sign of it.

The Huntress. I recognized her work before I ever saw her. Simply because I have never chosen to eat of flesh did not mean I was ignorant of the hunter’s trade. I understand how it is done, both in the wild and by the now civilized carnivores of our world. The pit trap was… brutal. Brutal is the best word. Brutality need not always be callous but this did not feel like swift and total violence in order to pursue sudden victory. This felt like revenge. The air tasted foul, and not because of the death that laid out below me.

Another point--there are many things that I am capable of that the average pony is completely unawares of, and I take great care that many of these abilities stay secret. My absolute command of time, for instance, is not so important a secret, and I confess some amusement when I can tell a pony down to the second how long something has taken. Others I keep closely guarded even from those little ponies I have taken quite sincerely into my intimate inner circle. I do not do this because I revel in secrecy. Rather, I wish to live as close to them as I can, and to share in as much of their happiness as I can without feeling their awe and reverence turn into fear and worse. To be admired is fine, but to be worshipped… I am not quite worthy of that.

One of those abilities I safeguard is this: a pony’s last moments can be reviewed under special circumstances. A few unicorns have managed the trick of it, but only through genius and perhaps some luck. For me it is simple and rather easy. The body was fresh, and its soul only recently absent. I touched the body with my magic and found the fading soulglow.

____________________

She faces him and he smiles in the manner of cats when they find their prey cornered and waiting for the release from all running.

“So… guess you did it. Figured you’d got swatted by that big thing,” he said slowly, still grinning. But he felt a mirth that did not seem to fit the sort of mirth I or this small Huntress could understand. It was mirth in the way that a candle is a housefire.

Does she tremble? I cannot tell for sure for I see and feel only what this beast sees and feels, and for him she trembles and he suppresses and urge to crow with delight. He thinks unspeakable things. Most of them violent. She is already dead, as far as he is concerned, but that is alright. He talks to the dead quite a bit. Mostly he mocks them.

“Fuck you,” she says, her voice shaking. And it is shaking, that is no distortion. She swallows. Afraid, yes, but not running.

I feel a weight upon this creature’s mind that at first I do not recognize. No, that is not true. I do recognize it, I simply do not understand why it is in this monster’s soulglow memory. I feel myself, distant but getting closer, like a thorn pressed into soft flesh. It will begin to torment him soon, as it pierces through the haze of his madness, but for now it only drives him to new lows. His blood is up. He is eager for what will happen next. He has won, after all.

Does she feel this too? She must.

“Got proof,” she says, and holds out a tattered and stained coat, cut through in a dozen places. Those stains… the soulglow howls that they are blood, but I know better. I know enough of the plants of the Everfree to recognize a certain Zebra’s handiwork. It would look perfect, to one uninitiated in the arts of cloak and dagger in this world.

“Guess so,” he slurs. There is not much personality for him to lose beneath the pouding of my presence upon the fragile walls of his mind. He is all appetite now. Hard, even, I realize with disgust. “Good job, bitch. I’m impressed.”

“Now what?”

“Throw me the coat,” he says, with surprisingly cleverness.

“So you can shoot me while I’m distracted? Come get it,” she says with a tight, frightened voice.

“Hey, hey, cool it. Already took off the stealth field, didn’t I? Gotta be enough for ya,” he says.

“Just come get it,” she says again.

He feels frustrated. She’s putting off his final victory lap and he has never, ever been denied or delayed without serious violence being played out on something. With a growl, he steps forward--

--and the ground gives way.

I felt his agony and his shock as he hit the spikes. His forehead grazes a spike but his head is preserved. He screams, and I wish I could also scream.

“BITCH! BITCH, I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU I’LL FUCK YOUR SKULL YOU--”

There is a horrible roar, and he stops screaming for a moment to whimper. He cannot see her, and so I do not see the source. But I can imagine--that terrible weapon she bears. That is it. The beast’s own firearm was lost in the fall. He tries to pry himself from the stakes.

“You’re dead,” she hisses. Her voice is thick and shaking.

Brutality comes most often from those blind with fear and those blind with rage. Yes, sometimes it is planned, but I find that it is the unthinking state of mind that is the most capable of destruction.

She does not seem to be either. If anything, she sounds like she will soon be sick.

“I’ll tear you apart and fuck what’s left!” He screams at her and she roars at him.

“You’re dead!” She repeated. “Poison on the spikes, but I won’t need it. You don’t get to play in this world anymore, you hear? Never again. You’re done! And soon your friends won’t be coming here anytime soon, got it? It’ll all be over! I’m gonna m-mount your head on a pike, do what they do to coyotes on fences. You know what they do coyotes on fences, f-fuckin’ city boy?”

He just screams.

_______________________

I left the memory with dismay and dread.

I search the area for a moment more. The head is gone, and the gun I find utterly smashed. This leaves me a bit more hopeful--only the Huntress could have done this. She has done me and my realm a grisly service, and when I approach the shattered weapon I feel the barest touch of her on it.

Fear bordering on panic. Nausea. Regret. Something so twisted up so as to be unnameable. Shame defeats them all.

A sad creature. Many who do what must be done have felt this shame. I resolved then to find her.

I found one other thing of note before I purged that place with fire. A small metallic device which activated upon physical touch. I have recorded the entirety of its message, and on top of it I will note that I felt mostly shame and fear.

“Oh god… oh god, okay. If you find this… shit, if you find this then you may still have time. You’re probably a bunch of fuckin’ Feds in your little murder squads but nobody deserves to go toe to toe with these monsters. No-fuckin-body. If you have recalls, use them. Please, for the love of god, use them. I found his body and… and I’m the last one left. Just go. Go! This place is a lost cause. The recon reports are a lie. We thought it was just a bunch of peasants and primitives but that’s the… fuck me if I know. Pets? The real natives are monsters. You look at them and its all eyes and mouths and light and they just fuck you up. You can’t think, you can’t move unless something distracts them, you can just run. They can burn you with their eyes from half a mile away without a bit of effort. They turned the Concordat guy to a crisp. Please, for the love of God, close the door and don’t let them through!”

That is it. It ends. All through, she is breathing heavily. All through, she is lying fiercely. Her fear is real. Her horror is real--I am sure it was recorded mere moments after she had removed the monster’s head. But even without my knowledge of this world, I would have known every word was a lie from millenia of experience. It is a carefully practiced lie… one that fell apart in her hands from the shock of killing another sapient creature, vile or not.

I admit that it caused me to pause there in that awful scene and consider what kind of creature this huntress was. Capable of such a brutal killing, and yet I felt such shame in her brief touches. Filled with such fury as she watched the “blackshirt” die, and yet her voice had shook. In some ways, it gave me hope that perhaps these humans had not fallen so far from the savage but potential-filled ones I had briefly espied.

Yet. Yet in those brief touches I felt the tiniest touch of the sickly sweet, cloying taste of madness. Of drums. Of me.

I continued.

The first death had not been a shock. The second, however, took me quite by surprise.

Once the remains of the monster had been cleared away, I proceeded towards my old home in the heart of the Everfree. I admit that I was not looking forward to seeing it again. It holds unpleasant memories for me, both of Luna’s banishment and my own multitude of failures afterwards. And before that, I suppose. Suffice it to say that the structure itself is a monument to failures.

That the huntress had made this ruin her new temporary home dismayed me more than I cared to admit. I wondered why at the time, as my grim war-focus began slowly to drain away. Was it that she had invaded what was, in some distant way, my home? Maybe, but I had abandoned it and so held no real claim to a ruin I would rather forget. I did not begrudge any creature without malice some simple shelter. Perhaps it was just… the similarity. Yes, I think I did notice the odd parallels forming. To turn on one’s own to save the many. True, it was not the same. She had not slain kin, and I had not slain at all, but perhaps we had both been hurt in the doing. She did not seem to me a true killer.

By the time I reached the Castle of the Two Sisters, I was more or less calm. The city of Everfree is mostly gone now, of course, but I do remember enough of it to have spared a few sighs as I walked over the ghosts of its streets. I wanted my first meeting with these strange new humans to be as close to perfect as I could make it. I did not fear them, but I respected their ferocity and their potential for it. If nothing else, I happen to enjoy meeting new ponies and I supposed that we might, with some delicate discussion and mutual awkwardness, establish some sort of friendship between those not cursed with madness and ourselves.

So imagine my shock when I began to feel the huntress again before I had even entered the keep. I felt shame, mostly. But something else. Horror is perhaps the best word. Certainty might also be appropriate. Horrible, horrible certainty. Something had changed between the first death and now. Or, well, I suppose then. And just as I had before, I felt myself thrumming in the background and felt a chill.

It is… It is very distressing, Twilight (if it becomes vital that you read this), to feel that you have had a negative effect on any creature, let alone one that you meant no harm to. One that in fact you are grateful towards for a ghastly but certainly necessary duty. I have inspired many things in ponies and other peoples of this world. Respect, awe, fear, even love here and there. But I cannot remember many times I have inspired madness. In what your professors no doubt dismissed as the age of myth I once cured a pony’s madness with kind words. Kind words and a bit of healing magic, at least. To have been the cause of the corruption I felt was disheartening.

No, I must be truthful.

For the first time in a rather long time, I was genuinely frightened.

I smelt blood when I entered the courtyard. That was not the first thing. The first thing that I smelled in my former home--where Luna and I enjoyed our lovely gardens--was the acrid stench of burned flesh. I did not gag, surprisingly, even if I have not smelt the like since the crusade against the Derecho Separatists a few decades after Luna’s fall. My smooth and easy walk became a canter, and that became something not quite a run. I must appear in command. The appearance of control is vital to the de-escalation of conflict.

Yet I found something that outmatched my calm demeanor. I found another pit right before the door of the Keep, but this time I found no body. Only the remains of blood, and here was a curious thing which turned the lump in my throat to ice: blood up the side of the pit, leading into the great hall. I followed it.

I felt the soulglow of the dead demanding my immediate attention, calling out for vengeance out of the earth, but I did not touch it yet. I stared in mute fascination at the scorchmarks on the ground. What had happened here? The death of the infiltrator I understood but… what was this? Who had done this?

By the scorch marks I found another of the small devices, and it set my teeth on edge. Proof, then.

But first, I touched the dead humans soulglow.

________________________________________

He walks with a deceptively easy gait, concealing the wounds of a dozen battlefields and a hunred dark black operations which haunt his dreams.

He is worried. When the huntress asked him to go back to the high tower, he had not questioned it. But when she had asked him shortly after leaving to go back and retrieve his auto-recall, he had been confused.

Why? He’d asked, and she’d had a reasonable enough answer: Because more are going to come and we need to make sure we’re ready if they have some sort of trace on his vitals. If the Federals were to open a window and find him dead… no, he’d understood that. So he had returned to his camp briefly and and quickly returned to find that the ponies had left.

That had been the first worrisome thing, but Samantha had assured him that she was responsible. Didn’t want them being human shields, she’d said, and he had nodded with a frown. Yes, but wasn’t this sending them into more danger? Ah, but it did not concern him overmuch.

He returned to his high tower.

When he saw the blip, he warned her. His hands were soaked with sweat and they trembled. He felt strange. Disconnected. Fearful of everything. What if he fired first? He might not even wait. OF course he wouldn’t wait. God, this had been so foolish! He was going to get someone killed without even profiting from the sacrifice. A waste of life. Idiot! Old, blind, fool!

But then she had reported that she’d seen him, and then radio silence. She returned. The blackshirt was dead. His coat had been torn, but Malthus did not care a thing for it. The Colonist grinned manically. They had done it! By god, they had done it. He had no idea how they had, but victory was victory.

“Stay in the high Tower,” she’d said. Keep an eye out, she’d continued.

The fear returned. Rumor of reinforcements. Hold the line, hold the line. Watch the trees for more of them. This he understood. He was back in Kiffa again, waiting for the goddamn moors to come crawling out of their holes again, swarming like ants down the dusty streets screaming and howling oh god they weren’t human they weren’t human he would send them back dying he would--

The huntress returned. She radioed him again and said that she was in the Great Hall.

Shaken by memory, the old man was glad to have company again.

He sprints down, almost slipping on the uncertain steps. It is unsettling to see the decay of my former castle through another’s unknowing eyes, one who cannot begin to understand or appreciate what he sees.

He bounds across the overgrown courtyard, feeling a desperate need to be in the presence of something human, something familiar. This world does not sit well with him. It is wrong. He has felt this way before but never so intensely. I know that it is the magic I have stirred up, yet my horror does not cease the turning of the wheels of his mind. This world must be remade. It must be reforged into the paradise that he needs. This world could be perfect. A new eden. A new heaven and a new earth, amen and hallelujah, made by man’s hands for man’s benefit. Now that the threat is gone the building could commence. The Concordat and Republic could have a full platoon moving into the castle soon. Why hadn’t he done it before? There was no time to waste. He would demand it! He would argue them down. This was where man was meant to find his new beginning!

She stands before the door, looking exhausted. He notices the blood seeping through her leg and comes up short. He asks if she is alright, and I realize that she is not long before he does. Perhaps some of that “fake” blood was real. Perhaps she fell. I do not know and am not sure I wish to know.

She is fine. She smiles a shaky, uneven smile. A smile that is not the smile I had imagined from Twilight’s brief description. It is a false smile. The hindbrain of the Colonist shrinks from it but he does not know why he feels the need to stop short. Everything is confused. They are both caught up in the madness of too much magic pressing upon a system that cannot handle an alien sun.

“Here’s your coat,” she says, and holds it out. “It got a bit torn. Bastard is dead.”

He does not cross. “Glad to hear it.”

She lowers the coat. “You look like hell,” she says quietly.

“It’s been… stressful,” Malthus says.

“It’s getting to you too? What is it?” The huntress whispers, with wide eyes.

“It feels heavy,” Malthus says in return.

“I think it might be the Princess,” his only human companion says and licks her lips. “Or God, maybe. He sees your sins, so they say.” She grins another sickly grin. “C’mon, take your coat and I’ll tell you about it and maybe that’ll put an end to some of the stress, alright?”

He does not move. “A thought occurred to me earlier, while you were away.”

“Yeah?”

“What book?”

She blinks. “Your pardon?”

“What book? You said you remembered a book, something… something about me. I meant to ask you earlier…”

She hesitates. He feels… nervous. On edge. He glances at the gun on her hip but it is safe for now. Why does he feel this way? She’s had ample chance to turn on him, and she has no reason. A disagreement, nothing more. He takes a step--

Her face twists into something that is not quite hatred. “Mistah Kurtz, he dead.”

He tries to answer in fury and shock, understanding it all in a flash, but then the ground gives way.

Malthus lies dying in the shallow pit. It destroyed his legs, and he knows her gun is on him.

“Why?” He asks. His throat is dry. “When?”

“When you went and got your recall,” she says, her voice tight. “When you went away. Because I know where it all leads. I’ve seen it all before.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Mistah Kurtz--”

“Do you honestly believe that tale and my own intentions coincided? Would you judge me a monster with so little consideration?” He coughed. It would not be the spikes themselves that killed but the blood, and that would be slow. She would keep him here. He could climb out, but then where would he go? He was trapped. “You’re an… God, you’re an idiot,” Malthus seethes.

“No, I’m just me and you’re just you, and that don’t matter none. You think I’ll long survive you?” She chuckles and it is not a sound of joy. “You think I don’t know what I’m doing? I’m fixin’ to be first and the last, Kurtz you colony-building fool. You think that it’ll come out alright? I’ve been thinking… I’ve been listening, you see? To the air. And it was right! You’ll bring the whole damn empire with you, and it’ll all be Amarillo forever, gunships mowing down mom in the street! You think you’re better because you ain’t a facist with a blackshirt? You’re just the same, you’re all the same, and so am I. We’re all in this together, filthy and murderous and awful!”

“You’re insane. This place…” he cried out. He is filled with terror. This was not what he expected. He had never foreseen this. He saw Kiffa again, the Moorish rebels firing from the crags, he felt the heat on his face as his world spun.

“Yeah, yeah, and you’re one to talk. You really, really think that we won’t turn this place into a livin’ nightmare? You don’t think we’ll do it all again here? And over and over and over?” She was practically in his ear now, but he was starting to feel too faint to try and look.

“You… you don’t know that…”

“And now nobody has to, because I’m gonna make sure nothin’ ever happens, and then I’m gonna make sure not even I can fuck it up. We’re all gonna fuckin’ go together.”

“They’ll… they’ll come anyway… you’ll only make… you’ve doomed them all.”

“No, because I’m going to scare the shit out of them.”

_____

I left the soulglow’s memory early. I already knew what came next.

She burned the body with alchemical fire, that much I knew from the lingering trace in the air. The “auto-recall” I assume sent the poor human’s charred remains back to his own land. I have no doubt she did the same with the “Federal”.

The third death was less physical than spiritual.

I went deeper into the castle, and found the remains of her camp and the places where the manticore’s claws had scarred the old stone. The hallways led me down, down towards the old treasure vault, and all the while I followed the fading aura she had left behind, her soul bleeding out in the middle of a great distress.

Down the long stairs I climbed, and I confess that I felt trepidation. I felt more and more of my own unintentional touch upon her. I had done so much work, trying to prevent this. What had I done? What had she done? How much of this was the madness of Presence and how much of it was her own determination? I did not know. I do not know.

I feared that it was less my own interference and more the huntress’ own will.

I found her at last in the vault. It was mostly clear, save for a few dusty relics and a few old paintings.

I found her dirty, bloodstreaked, curled up in on herself, her whole body shaking. Her face twisted with an agony I did not wish to understand too closely. The weapon shook also in those hands of hers, limply against the underside of her jaw. Her ebony hands tried to tighten but could not.

“Gotta… gotta… Oh god. Oh god I can’t.”

I stared, for the first time in a long time without anything to say or any prepared plan. This… this I had not anticipated. Even now I feel again my initial shock.

It took me a moment to remember her name through the haze of that shock. “Samantha? Samantha, do you hear me? Can you understand me?”

“Traps. I have to… Like coyotes. Pin the body to the fence and they don’t come back no more,” she said, all but frothing. “Pin the bodies pin the bodies.”

I took a deep breath. I could not retreat now. She would be too dangerous without something to keep her in check, and I would not choose her comfort over the safety of my ponies. And yet I would not abandon a fellow creature so lost. I drew closer and she groaned.

“I don’t wanna die! I don’t wanna die don’t make me! I’m sorry! I didn’t want him to do it but then he was movin’ and I couldn’t take it back! I shouldn’t’a said it I shouldn’ta! Oh my god. Oh my god.”

I scooped her up in my forelegs and stroked her strange, bright red mane. Obviously colored artificially, clashing strangely with her skin. These humans were beyond me. Her hair was coarse, not unlike a pony’s fresh from the plains. Her eyes, unfocused. Her lips trembling. She looked at me but I do not think that at first she saw me.

“They can’t come I don’t want them to hurt anybody else. That little pony keeps lookin’ at me and I feel like I’m those bastards in Amarillo. I’m the blackshirt now. I had to. I coulda found a way but I didn’t! I just kept feelin it in my head like a drumbeat, over an’ over. Oh my god.” The last came out like a groan and I shushed her. She was streaked in blood, yes, but I realized that much of it was her own. She was cut in a dozen places, and I think those wounds were self-inflicted. She held her gun tight in her hand, and only with the most delicate touch of magic did I pry it free. She whimpered, cradling her hand as if it had been burned and murmured plaintively about hell and spells.

I must be truthful, if only with myself.

For the briefest of moments, I examined the weapon. Truly, it is a fearsome thing. In the old days, before I erased such things from the minds of mortals for hundreds of years, ponies mastered saltpeter and produced flintlock weapons. I recognized the basics but the implementation… this was beyond me. Rifling I knew of, but this was precise. Six shots before one of my ancient musketeers could have even reloaded! How terrifying rifles of this type would be.

For the briefest of moments, I imagined myself tilting the gun back to her temple, kissing her forehead…

And ending it.

I know that must shock you. I shocked myself. It was a terrible moment. I had just witnessed two murders and seen this poor mare devolve into gibbering madness merely by the presence of magic in a world full of it. She was a murderer, that much was clear. A killer, stained with blood. Dangerous and ruthless, capable of savagery that none of my precious little ponies could hope to stand against.

And perhaps I shared her fear. I imagined more poor, damaged humans such as her, with hearts for ponies but with bodies and souls made for a different world. Unable to bear our own, unable to let go of their guns until they were bathed in blood. And like the old man, like this poor soul, I too saw flashes of older days. I saw my sister, and the destruction she wrought on an unsuspecting world. I saw my own failures. I had not nipped the danger in the bud. I had not been a sister worthy of her. I had not done what was needed.

I destroyed her fearsome weapon.

She sobbed. I searched her swiftly with my magic, seeing my student’s brilliant but inadequete work. I completed it, enshrouding her in protection so strong I doubted any but myself or Luna could even think to touch her with any arcane force.

She trembled, her breath ragged and warm against my coat.

“I think I killed myself,” she said, and her hollow voice broke my heart.

“You have not,” I said to her. “Samantha, do you recall anything? Anything at all?”

“All of it. Are you god?”

I did not let my anger show. “No.”

“You’re the one that… that one pony. Twilight Sparkle. She said you…” Her eyelids drooped. “Celestia, right?”

“Yes,” I said quietly.

“It’s over now. I don’t know if it was right but I can’t take it back. I didn’t want them to hurt anybody so I hurt them. I’m no better. Please don’t send me back. I don’t wanna have to go back. I can’t do it.”

I took a deep breath. “Child, you are in no shape to talk now, please rest--”

She squirmed in my grip weakly. “Someone has to… has to understand. They think this place is too dangerous… I wanted… C…” She groaned. “I feel really…”

“Sleep,” I said. “Your body has endured much.”

“Shoulda done it…” she said, and then she said nothing else.