The crystal pony maid Amore Heart—or Cadance, as she knew herself, and formerly Princess Mi Amore Cadenza to the nobles—had been demoted again. She hadn’t done a good job cleaning up the rooms of two different nobles that week. It was her fault, and she knew it; she would be out of a job and out of the Palace if Miss Martinette were still in charge, so she wasn’t going to contest the decision.

Not that she could say anything at all. She had found out the hard way that the transformation spell she used on both of her Shining Armors had the property of melding with other active enchantments. The false Shining Armor’s mute spell had become part of the pony she was now. Her voice wasn’t suppressed at all; she simply didn’t have one.

In retrospect, it was poetic justice, Cadance thought as she set to cleaning the scullery floors for the evening. Her fake Shining was right—she was too careless with her words. She hadn’t been mindful of anything beyond the tip of her muzzle, really. She wouldn’t be wrapped in a cute little maid uniform and struggling to keep a job in the service wing of the Crystal Palace if she had been careful about anything she’d done in the past few years. But one mistake had led to another, and in a whirlwind of pain and impulsiveness, she had trapped herself here.

She wasn’t held here by a binding of her will, like the Persona spell had done to the husband she had loved too carelessly. She was glad for one last act of carelessness: She had been too lost in a fit of self-flagellatory passion to think of using that abomination of magic on herself. Instead, she transformed herself and ran off to join the maid staff that had helped her destroy her husband.

It was a good thing, in retrospect. Growing up under the watchful eye of Princess Celestia, she had taken one message to heart: Whatever you do, make sure it can teach you something. And when there was no spell forcing her to do everything she was told, she had to put her own will into everything she was told to do as a maid. If nothing else, lacking the ability to argue or talk back or even explain her failures meant she was receiving a crash course in humility and hard work.

What trapped Cadance, instead, was her next-to-last act of utter thoughtlessness. She had transformed herself to a crystal pony, to better fit in among the citizens of her city-state Empire. She hadn’t stopped to gain a more thorough understanding of the transformation spell when she was horny for her final night with the real Shining Armor, and she hadn’t stopped to study the spell when she was desperate to find an appropriate punishment. She hadn’t known, until she tried to escape it, that the transformation was as real as such things came.

Thus, while she still held tremendous, alicorn-level reserves of unicorn, pegasus, and earth pony magics, she hadn’t the right hooves, wings, or horn to channel any of them; crystal ponies had their own unique magic, of which she hadn’t even a drop.

Not only was she trapped, she was only marginally useful. Six and a half months of hellish toil had finally brought her up to par for one humble task, though, and six and a half months of scolding and near-uselessness had even brought her pride in her accomplishment: She was finally good enough to keep the dismal little scullery, and all the dishes and laundry within, spotlessly clean.

Cadance paused for a moment to give her reflection in the wet floor a wan smile. The dull aquamarine mare in the puddle smiled back, right up until a quick slosh of the mop pushed the water along to clean the next stretch of floor.

She really had fallen. But it was for the best. She deserved a humble, humbling life after she—she had—

The right word was too harsh to admit, but she had learned enough to face the monster she was. Her husband, her real Shining Armor, her knight, her prince, her love, had tried to refuse her. She had been horny, and angry over their missed anniversary; she hadn’t listened, had barely even heard him. She hadn’t even stopped there, turning her initial offense into an even worse “vacation,” but the former, if nothing else, justified what she had done to herself, and it justified accepting that she was stuck.

Besides, she thought as she hefted the soaked mop and rinsed it in the bucket, the labor was good for her. Besides the lessons she was learning by making herself do whatever she was told, it had been so long since her premature ascension to alicornhood had near-forcibly excused her from physical labor that she’d forgotten how good it felt to do hard work with her hooves. Even if the work was exhausting, demanding, and sometimes demeaning, she’d seldom rested better than on the simple, hard beds in the maids’ barracks.

Well, there had been the nightmares…

Cadance paused for a moment to shudder before continuing with her work. Of course, the content of the nightmares had caught Luna’s attention, and the older princess had been thrilled to see her adopted niece again once the terrors had been dispelled and the dream turned lucid. She had very nearly tried to force Cadance to reveal where she’d gone.

“Please, Aunt Luna, don’t tell anypony. Don’t come and find me,” Cadance had begged. At least in the dream world, she could still speak. “I don’t deserve it. Not now.”

Luna had finally relented, after extracting several promises that Cadance was safe and her nightmares were only nightmares, not the construct of some horrible creature like the Tantibus. That had been followed by the revelation that the Night Princess already knew the gist of what Cadance had done, thanks to the false Shining Armor’s nightmares—which Cadance realized she should have expected.

“You will do what you must.” The structure of Luna’s dream-self had rippled unpleasantly as she reached her conclusion. “I do not like it, and I do not approve. But if you are truly safe, for as long as I believe you are not needlessly harming yourself or other ponies and you are instead learning your lesson, Celestia and I shall be the only ones to know. I will cease my efforts to locate and arrest you only because the greatest fears to torment you here were not of retribution, but of repetition of your crimes.”

It had been that incident, two months after her disappearance, which finally grounded Cadance. Her efforts prior to that had been focused on punishing herself; ever since, she had turned to learning. Not that it made her any more worthy of the throne she’d left vacant; even if she could change herself back and claim it, there was a long journey between the pony who stood on her horseshoes and the pony who deserved to rule.

But Luna hadn’t been the only one to find her, and unfortunately, she wasn’t difficult to read; it didn’t help that when a crystal pony didn’t glitter and shine with a beautiful inner light, anypony could tell something was wrong just by looking at her. Fending off the well-meaning questions of the maids or the rare observant noble without being able to speak was difficult on its own, and they didn’t even intend to find her out. Both of Cadance’s once-lovers, both Shining Armors, had probably seen through her facade altogether.

The false stallion was particularly likely to have made her; he’d been finding more and more ways and opportunities to involve the Princess in various sexual games he would never play with another mare. On the most blatant occasion, he had enchanted her with a terribly weak, but always-on, version of the vibrator spell she had found. He had made her suffer for hours before the magic dissipated, tormenting her with vibrations that just weren’t strong enough to give her release, while she struggled to tidy his bedchamber.

She couldn’t break down and beg for more or touch herself, either. There was still the chance he was just misbehaving, for which she didn’t blame him. Besides, his casual manner and orders to simply clean up—despite the erection he’d tried to hide by lying down with a book—made it clear that she would “lose” whatever the game was if she lost control.

Being so casually dominated and molested while she worked, without any means of escape or the slightest say in the matter, had lit a fire in her that made the rest of the day torture; it was like the worst of her pubescent estrus all over again. When her work was finally over—catching up on chores after taking so long with what had been her own bedroom kept her up for hours after her usual schedule—she had gone straight to bed and begun clopping herself silly.

And that, Cadance remembered as she returned to the maids’ barracks and collapsed atop her sheet, had led to her current arrangement—because she had forgotten to make sure the mare resting in the bunk across from hers was actually asleep.

That mare, Spit Shine, was as crude and vulgar as her name implied. She shamelessly abused her own interpretations of rules, and even her accent screamed “lowborn.” And by forgetting her privacy, Cadance had drawn her attention.

“Well, don’t you look a sight?” And speaking of the devil… Cadance turned over and looked up, just in time to have her head pinned to her mattress by a face full of pussy. “Now, I think you know the drill, love.”

The trapped Princess did know the drill, and while she couldn’t say no, she could always disobey. She had, the first time; as enjoyable as it had been trading sexes with her husband and fucking his newfound pussy in every way she could think of, she had still been too angry with herself to play with anypony when Spit Shine approached her, and another mare was only a little more fun than masturbating when she had a pussy of her own. It wasn’t as if mares felt or tasted bad, though, and as she obediently lifted her tongue to please the one sitting on her muzzle, she knew there was another, desperately-needed lesson buried in the act.

“Just a maid,” she’d said. The memory made her snort. She wasn’t above anypony.

She could live like this. She would live like this, despite the best efforts of her Shining Armors. All the alicorn magic trapped inside her did have one practical application: It would keep her alive, and even relatively young, for at least a few more centuries.

Perhaps in another standard lifetime or two she could be trusted with power and worthy of claiming the crown. More likely, another pony would sit on the throne by then, and that was probably for the best; she could retire to the palace of her royal aunts in Equestria, or possibly the crystal castle of her sister-in-law. Or maybe… maybe she would stay on as a maid for whomever ruled the Crystal Empire a few generations from now. She might even be a good one by then.

The only thing she was certain of was that she had to outlive both the real Shining Armor and the fake before she could think about coming out of hiding. They could forgive her, but she would never trust herself around them again.

Then the other maid derailed her thoughts with a well-placed tongue. Crude, rude, and oft-ungrateful as Spit Shine was, the touch reminded her that the mare always paid at least one orgasm for her own climax. That was their arrangement. And as the pussy covering her mouth began to twitch, the thighs straddling her head tightened to comfortably squash her face, and Spit Shine’s gasps built to a high and shameless cry of pleasure, Amore Heart took comfort in the knowledge that she could at least do one thing right.

Author's Note

Edited by Damaged and pre-read by TwistedSpectrum. Thanks again!

This chapter exists mainly because of Penalt, and draws inspiration from the epilogue to TwistedSpectrum's Royal Duties.