Author's Note

Content warning for this chapter: dead body described in detail, along with injury and decay, mentioned rape and sexual violence/sadism. Hints of eating disorders, etc.
Post-chapter author's note (read for trivia): Any of the mores realistic errors regarding the stages of decomposition here are all on me. I know very little about how horses would decompose. I'm much more familiar with the stages of human decomposition, and any more dead bodies described in here are going to be using that set of stages because I seriously know so little about how tf a horse would decompose. Also, Balikun-Shetland is a horse pun on Bedford–Stuyvesant, which is a neighborhood in Brooklyn. It's a combo of the name of the Balikun horse breed and the one for a Shetland pony. Derby Avenue is a reference to Lexington Avenue, a street in that neighborhood, being altered because Lexington > Kentucky > Kentucky Derby > Neighhhhh! Barnacle is a reference to a G1 pony of the same name and follows the same trend of having crown-controlled morgues near forts featured in Halfway Mare and its teen version, With Her Dead Eyed Stare. Bretonlyn Heights is also just Horse Brooklyn Heights using the Breton horse breed.Bucklyn is also an incredibly good horse pun. Even though it also means Brooklyn, I couldn't waste it. So, I decided to make it the name of one of the territories on the bay.

Chapter 6: The First Corpse

Tatters of a mare had been found in a brownstone building close to Balikun-Shetland. The discovery sites had been one of the more obvious initial surprises regarding the situation to coroner Ebony Henbane. First was the location: she had simply not expected such a terribly abused corpse to be found in one of Manehattan’s more average neighborhoods. Something as heinous as a murder troubled her. The idea of a mare being found such a short distance from a main street like Derby Avenue begged the question about how she could have gotten in her reputed state…

...At least, it was a question until Ebony finally got her hooves on the mare. There was a bit of insult in having one of the best embalmers at the Morgue of Manehattan and Fort Barnacle be given this particular kind of pony. She had drawn the sheet back with her magic only to find that there was nothing about these remains that could be preserved through such a method, even if the legal right to such funerary treatment was lawful for this foul sort.

Ebony actually had preferences over the kinds of remains she preferred to deal with, and civilian ones were at the top of the list. She rarely ever had to deal with family — gods know she didn’t become a coroner to deal with ponies — and those that she did were always diverse in makeup and how they had cared for their family.

The only thing diverse about anypony in sex crimes was the way that they died.

A brownstone was a relief compared to the places these kinds of remains were usually found because many residents usually had no idea they lived next to somepony so foul until guards showed up for any reason. Lawful residents meant the overall environments remains were found in were generally more hygienic than the few derelict places such sorts usually had taken up. Ebony recalled reading a case file from years ago regarding the butchered limbs of a few illegal 'models' — though, nothing they did could be considered modeling — recovered from a condemned building on the bay. The particularly sadistic Manehattanite killer had disposed of them in a remote Bucklyn cottage due to the freedom to do what they pleased there. The conditions that those bones had been concealed in! Gods, Ebony figured only Tartarus itself could be worse.

She was left to analyze most of a torso and roughly half of the hindquarters of this mare. One hind leg was still intact, and that still looked like somepony had tried to dull a whole collection of knives when cutting up the thing. Upon closer inspection, it was not so far from the truth. The kinds of marks that Ebony had been able to accurately identify as knife’s cuts upon the mare had been from kitchen knives instead of the meat-cutting kind in New Shirdal’s carnivore shops. Their handling suggested a pony wielding the blades too, most likely a particularly spastic unicorn by the frenzy put into the strikes.

The prostitute had been given those leg gashes while she was still alive. The mid-section of her body was what was desecrated postmortem. Most of the mare’s coat was cheaply dyed-over so many times. The original color and most of what remained, in general, was known only to the killer, who had taken such delight in paring off so much the whore’s epidermis. It was like they had wanted the first thing Ebony to see was how the results. Did the killer anticipate how the results would shock the coroner who finally got to see them — two days after the body had already been exposed enough to attract attention from assorted insects?

Ebony’s mask only helped so much. Gods-dammit, if she did not get a request for a raise granted after this, there would have to be somepony else to pick through the dead, half-decayed, worthless whores of the city. Let the guards have all the half-decayed living ones. Gods knew this one was at one such criminal at one point. The severely malnourished state of the pony had made the bone breaks her buyers give her heal improperly at their best. No psychologist was needed to say this one was probably suffering from masochistic disorders in life if she was willing to stand what definitely weren’t foalhood injuries and letting her leg be shredded up.

Despite all the crop marks (gods, why was she always stuck with the most depraved freaks) across her back and hindquarters, Ebony Henbane was able to conclude she had no cutie mark. Most participants in higher crimes never had any. Why that was, she had no exact explanation for. Ebony wasn’t a cutie mark expert, but she had personally known a stallion who had nothing to him but being an utter pervert in high school. At the twenty-year school reunion she attended, he was still a degenerate with his blank flank as the exclamation point to what a washed-out, literal basement-dwelling disappointment he was. However, he had never sunk as far as self-exploitation or participating in it. He was just a lecherous freak that Ebony Henbane wished could be locked up in the same way Princess Celestia knew to lock up whores and studs.

Oh, that stallion had never killed anypony. He had had his name circulated, seeing how he was nothing more than a lecherous bum banned from a few general stores for harassment of employees, but nopony ever implicated him for any sexual or violent crimes. He was self-destructive in a withering kind of way, which was better than if anypony had the misfortune to try and get together with him at any point and been victimized as a result.

It was almost karmic, to borrow an elephant concept, that perversions and violence got nopony anywhere in every possible sense. Cutie marks on the scum of Equestria, or any pony nation, were an exception rather than a rule, but even the most enigmatic of those marks were still nothing that could relate to sexuality or cruelty — or gods forbid the inevitably horrific results when both were erroneously combined. Every class on the arcane sciences from adolescence to the highest university classes always had some passing reference to the phenomenon: no cutie marks ever existed for violence, nor any kind of sexual reason, from either healthy sexuality or something maladaptive, like Ebony's old schoolmate or the dead whore spread before her.

Even with the too-literal philosophy of talents pushed to the side — though, really how could things like brutality really be considered a talent — the mystery of cutie marks still made something clear. You had to make or have something going in your life to get to show your best self on your flank. Being a brute or a degenerate was as far from the best anypony could be. The only other exception Ebony recalled hearing anything about was from one of the psychology-of-this with magical-influences-of-that course from Tall Tale’s Starswirl College of the Mind and Body she had to take ages ago. It had been about how ponies suffering from severe intellectual and cognition impairment their whole lives often gained only the cutie marks of their simple joys — or nothing at all — and lived modest lives as somepony’s neighbor, waitress, grocery-bagger, or unskilled this-or-that. Which, of course, was as far removed from the awfulness of the ponies placed before Ebony.

Ebony had not attended a cutie mark class for a long time. She just cut open the ponies who could no longer be called late bloomers, but instead selfless in the most literal sense, and tried not to gag at their lingering stench. She was stuck in a hall of freezers with glorified trash stretched in front of her, a headache, and the part of her that knew better to just head home to Bretonlyn Heights, where her wife would be waiting for her.

Instead, she was completing a file on a mare whose remains would never be claimed by anypony who knew her and could give her an identity. Nopony even had an idea to what her product name — really, Ebony had no better name for such ludicrous, self-imposed labels — for herself was.

What was left of her teeth were a teaser of information: the mare was quite the old gray whore of twenty-two years old, showed signs of the distinct decay of a heavy bulimic, and frequently got herself slapped hard enough to have vertical denture fractures. What made No Name of Bali-Shet so difficult and traditional when it comes to ponies like her was that she still did not have enough teeth — at least not healthy ones — to make any identification.

Most likely, after she was cremated and stored away, this mare would be lucky to gather a posthumous nickname to be remembered by instead of her assigned number. The few cold cases Ebony Henbane was aware of usually had the plain pattern of Miss or Mister of Here or There. Even when a confession was gained or the killers were caught, the true identity of these ponies was still lost. Their murderers rarely knew them by anything but product names, appearances, locations, methods of doing the deed, or the identity they projected on the ponies they preyed upon.

Solved cases happened more often than not, but solving the slaying of ponies who managed to 'murder' parts of a city and society at large in different ways was not a popular job. The guards knew what they were doing, unlike these ponies. Ebony could say this because she found far too many toothbrushes and items of a similar shape and length in the mare’s stomach, a sure sign that this mare followed the old adage of how stupidity was trying the same thing endlessly, even if it didn't work. A lesser coroner would think the pegasus had pica.

The wings of this pegasus were ornamental at this point, and that was putting it kindly. This mare was an idiot in life or paid no attention to whatever hygiene and pegasus life education she had. The prostitute's whole physiology suffered from the mangled wings she bore. For Miss Bali-Shet, the disgusting state of the feathered limbs was the crown to how damaged they were.

Wings were never meant to be restrained. Even the specially made prison bindings that incarcerated pegasi had to wear could do damage if never changed. If they were alternated and managed properly this was reduced drastically, despite a pegasus with a sentence of any length having to wear those bindings for any time to months to the rest of their life. Outside of imprisonment under law and arrests, to bind the wings of a sapient creature under any other circumstance in such a manner was as illegal as cutting off an earth pony's hooves or splitting open a unicorn's skull to rob them of their horn, brains, and the complex core connecting both.

Tying up wings, pulling wings, binding wings, and any kind of treatment that didn’t leave them free was self-destructive to the highest degree. Pulling and plucking feathers was also terrible torture to inflict on any winged creature, and yet this mare had so much of just that disgusting treatment inflicted on her long before she died. To do so to a non-sapient animal was the fastest way to be imprisoned for abuse, and the punishments only stacked higher against doing the same to a sapient creature, under any circumstances. Civilians didn’t even have access to the kind of props that would be needed to inflict such abuse. Miss Bali-Shet should have just gone to a griffon shop and asked them to put her wings through a meat grinder while they were attached to her if she wanted to be tortured so badly. It would have been less than what she got, and the blood loss would have been enough to get rid of one more idiot in the world.

Bald patches occurred where her feathers weren’t broken. She clearly never preened them in any way or abandoned any semblance of hygiene for a couple of years, minimum. Every feather was scraggly and decayed, bent, and greasy. The joints were effectively crippled from whatever terrible things she had been allowing wrapped around where they were conjoined with the rest of her body. The evidence of bad bone breakages on the ugly appendages did suggest she had been in contact with somepony who got a thrill over slamming them in doors repeatedly during her adolescence. The number of pegasus specialists Ebony had to contact to positively identify those breakage patterns nearly drove her up a wall.

One wing was severely disfigured, but in life had some range of motion — an abnormal and painful one, certainly, but there likely had been reflex to it. The other was cramped up, the skin evidently black and limp some time before death, and entirely featherless. Old, untended, and thick burn scars from debilitating wounds gained at some point in her adulthood. Ebony Henbane cursed herself for being unable to tell just when those wounds had been gained. The pegasus was too badly decayed around the torso from the treatment to her front midsection, and the information from other examiners regarding possible facial restorations and her original colors for sketches hadn’t come back. There most likely would have to be multiple sets to show some of her injuries might have come from early life.

Her skull had to be kept elsewhere. Those teeth were the closest to any real identification and evidence other than a silver hoop earring found in one of the mare’s ears. Losing such precious artifacts to Miss Bali-Shet’s inevitable cremation would be terrible, as would the other customary last pieces: mane samples, tubes of blood, hoof clippings, and in this mare’s case, feathers.

For a prostitute, this mare had died at an older age. Her teeth also weren’t terrible enough to suggest she had been able to fall beneath social services’ notice and live like that forever. Her family was still out there, anywhere in Equestria, or she had a friend who might recognize her as somepony from forever ago before any rot set in. As much as the family would be within their right mind to not want to claim this disaster, surely they retained some grasp of their civic duty?

Unfortunately for this mare, there was far too much evidence on her muzzle of what Ebony couldn’t imagine had been anything close to a consensual encounter, given the circumstances and how quickly this mare had likely been attacked once bought… and that she had been bought at all.

A mare had done this. That much was clear by what had been left. Ebony was not surprised, after all, what should make her feel so? Mares and stallions were equally capable of heinous deeds, and the usage of weapons and various objects to batter the slain victim before Ebony was more consistent with a female offender’s modus operandus in terms of violence. Had an average stallion attacked this mare, Ebony was a veteran of this morbid career long enough to know she would be expecting more bruising — perhaps evidence of strangulation by magical or non-magical means too.

Ebony Henbane’s notes on Miss Bali-Shet were required of everypony in the morgue. Upon a successful examination, official causes of death and facts of the corpse in life were to be scribbled down. But Equestrian law also dictated another section be added for more than professional observations and positive conclusions. In the case of a murder or other non-natural death, the investigating guards and coroners were given the heavy task of chronicling the might-have-been and first speculations.

So far, Ebony had filled out close to a half-dozen papers of cramped hornwriting on the matter. The history of breakages indicated the mare was either pulled into the crime since she was a teenager, which would suggest she was either a runaway or her guardians sold her out to the offending stock who had no conscious about the wrongness of purchasing another pony, and a child at that. Had she been a runaway who managed to keep herself from falling into the usual period where the Royal Guard swiftly shut down anypony engaged in self-exploitation (anywhere from three months to two years) but the history of abuse would have remained unchanged in that theory. The abuse she suffered in the long term would only fall squarely upon the withers of her buyers.

Affording a brownstone would mean she was able to hide much of her physical impairment and was likely very popular — an unfortunate case, as it meant there were now gods-knew-how-many ponies walking free for their half of the crime. If her landlord was not close to the center of the investigation now, they ought to be, just for being a distinct possibility. Even offering a fake name on papers could be a clue, if she had actually secured her residence upfront instead of trying to seek — or purchase — other loopholes. Ebony knew it wasn't uncommon for self-exploitation criminals to hire somepony who appears less damaged to pose as them when securing a residence to use for their heinous deeds.

The neighborhood she was in did not match one high in sexual offenses; no other forms of self-exploitation had ever been busted there and no sexually motivated murders had occurred within the neighborhood’s borders. Bali-Shet was also a pure neighborhood, making it illegal for any registered offenders like a non-acting pouláriphilic brute or an ex-participant in the crimes Miss Bali-Shet had lost her life doing. For her to dare set hoof in such a fine space and dirty it with her crimes would have bumped up her sentence considerably, had she ever lived to be brought to justice.

A prostitute who was bad at being apprehended or suspected was usually one who was unlikely to have their case solved. From the start of their illegal endeavors, they had to be a pony without prior connections but willing to let themselves be known only in Equestria’s slim excuse for an underworld. Other criminals despised them for their unsanitary states, cruelty, foolishness, lack of skill, and horrible ability to succeed at evading law enforcement indefinitely. Their utterly unsophisticated existence and status as sex offenders meant that they lacked the interconnected network a hitpony and a mercenary might have that could produce information ponies and evidence beyond the crime they wasted their life engaging in. They were one of the few kinds of criminal that was often a victim of other unsavory sorts, due to the foul natures of their buyers. With no lives, jobs, little paper trails, health records, and status as close to a ghost as a living pony could have, the danger and disease they were to society were starkly apparent.

If this mare had vanished from a decent home when she was, as an example, twelve then she was but a young, promising shoot instead of the weed she ended up dying as. That would be what she would have to be compared to, and what everypony would have to dig through memory for: a half-forgotten filly that no doubt aimed to be a flower of a mare and make her own hoofprint on the world, only to wind up destroyed by her own hooves and others. Murdering a pony like this was taking out somepony that nopony remembered. Physically, a twelve-year-old who managed to be so lost from years of memories would have so little resemblance to the corpse she was now. To solve the murder of a prostitute was ultimately to try and figure out the demise of a child nopony knew had died — or that they had suddenly reemerged into a life they had disappeared from.

And Ebony Henbane had dealt with too many of these fools and children. Gods, too many of the mares would eventually have their own unregistered children, whose short lives would be poisoned and dark. Unless, they were lucky enough to be taken in by foal welfare services and adopted into a loving home while their mothers-in-name only were erased with years-to-life in a cell, never to see them again. In the case of studs, both parents would get that same sweet sentence: the mother for soliciting a sex offender, and in doing so becoming one herself, and the father for being one.

The last thing Ebony Henbane had to add to her notes was the only real exceptional peculiarity upon the corpse. The cause of death was from numerous, tiny crimson deep ruby crystals in possession of an oddly damp quality that never went away, regardless of how they were prepared and quarantined. These crystals had pierced the soft flesh of the mare in so many crude tears and cruel punctures. In hindsight and on her notes, Ebony had been careful to add how the peeled skin made the attack on the mare like the steps to prepare meat.

Glistening, mysterious crystals were never common, no matter the odd magics and mayhem that could go into a murder — whether it be in Manehattan or elsewhere in Equestria. Crystals so endlessly ruby-bright that turned out to be made of the victim’s own blood and unknown magic were one of a kind. The Equestrian Arcane Registry Base would need every sample of the substance possible to be able to identify the aura behind the caster of the crime. Every unicorn in Equestria was in that base, with the arcane processes, aural maps, and young magitech to link various unicorns to places by magical signature too.

Other creatures with magical auras could find their way into the EARB too, but aside from running through them, there was no other evidence that could positively be linked with a non-equine because the tech wasn't advanced enough to identify non-unicorn signatures yet. Unicorns were at the top of the list for this kind of magical offenses, and Ebony Henbane pitied whoever was tasked with sifting through the thousands of suspects that could exist in Manehattan alone.

She looked over the notes and levitated at the mare missing more than just chunks of her putrid, crystal-embedded flesh and tried to keep her withers from shaking with distant sobs aching to be. The hardass mare of death in Manehattan-Barnacle was weary beyond belief. The city Ebony held as so beloved in her heart struggled more than most places in Equestria, but it was no hotbed of crime! Yes, every pony like Miss Bali-Shet, her equally disgusting buyers, and her unknown killer tainting her urban jewel broke her heart — and she was not alone in this — but the Big Apple was no bad one, and gods knew it was her home and the home of millions of other ponies! The mare who never cried over any dead brought before her was watching her city whisper of terrible things, not of one foul murder against the urban island sprawl that was dear Manehattan, but that murder so foul must have more to come.

And the worst part was that she knew this wouldn’t be the last time she saw such crystals. By the gods, she knew it couldn’t be.