Author's Note
“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.” - Patrick Rothfuss
Best Served Cold
Queen Chrysalis opened her eyes slowly. She was in a dimly-lit, stone room. She was on her back, shackled to a hard, cold table. Her horn was unable to use magic. She was no longer wearing her pony disguise.
She had become accustomed to her one disguise identity over the years in her exile from her hive, after that unicorn, Starlight Glimmer, usurped her. Since then, she had been posing as a brothel matron just outside of Las Pegasus. Feeding on lust was fast food for a changeling. It was hardly filling, nor the nourishment she craved from real love. But it was better than nothing. And after a while, she felt safe in her position, secure in her survival. Complacent.
And then, one day, he showed up.
She didn't even recognize him at first. He wore a full ensemble of clothes, and a large concealing hat, and dark sunglasses. It wasn't unlike many of her clients that did not wish to be recognized or seen entering her house of ill repute.
Unlike her other clients, he seemed to have little interest in the talent she stocked in the lobby. Most would take some time to 'shop around' before making a selection. But this stallion walked a bee line directly over to her. He stopped and stood there in front of her hostess podium. A blue flash burst from under his large hat and the room went quiet. Not just that, but silent, and still. Her eyes scanned the room and everypony was frozen in place, some in mid-step. Even the pendulum of the grandfather clock was held still.
"What did you do to my girls!?" she demanded. The stallion slowly took off his hat and dark sunglasses. Shining Armor was the last pony she ever expected to see walking into her establishment. But here he was. He calmly looked across the counter at her. Chrysalis kept her poise, and maintained her disguise. He hadn't made her yet.
"Hello," he greeted, "Your Highness." The jig was up. Her horn glowed green, ready to volley a magical attack.
"No," he spoke without passion, hitting her horn with a readied magical counterattack. The shock of the strike knocked her unconscious.
Strapped to the table, she could not tell how long she had been out. But aside from being bound, she was otherwise unharmed.
"Ah, awake at last?" she heard him ask from the darkness. She twisted her head around to try and see where he was. He stood and moved his chair closer to the side of her table. She tried to use her magic again. She felt a sharp sting in her forehead.
"Ah, ah. I wouldn't do that," he said. He rolled a large cart over to her table, pulling back the large cloth uncovering it just enough to reveal a small hoof-mirror. He levitated it in front of her face. In the reflection, she could see that her twisted changeling horn was covered with black, crystal protrusions.
"Do you like it?" he asked, rhetorically. "It's a little hex I picked up from the late King Sombra. Much more effective than a mere Arcane Inhibition horn ring. And it keeps you-" he tapped his own horn with his hoof, "Out of here. Only the best for you, Your Highness."
"What are you going to do!?" she hissed at him.
"I'm actually glad you asked," he said calmly. "Because I'm going to tell you exactly what I'm going to do to you."
"You think you're going to reform me!?"
"Reform you," he repeated. "Re-form, you," he said again, putting intentional emphasis into each syllable. "Yes, I suppose. After a fashion. But probably not in the way that you are thinking. More like... how a sculptor re-forms clay."
"Are you going to kill me then?" she asked. He didn't answer. He just sat there and stared at her. "Torture then?" His face was expressionless, save for the tired look of fatigue that came with age. "You wouldn't! You can't! You ponies have rules!" He waited a moment longer to answer.
"You know, Chrysalis, I've never been very fond of rules," he said. She snorted at him in disbelief. "No, I mean it," he continued. "I was actually quite the rebel in my youth. I was made to join the Royal Guard. Though I'm sure Twilight Sparkle remembers it a little differently. I gave her the impression that it was my choice to join. But I had actually gotten into quite a fair bit of trouble."
"Are you going to tell me your life story? This is literally torture!" she screamed.
"Figuratively."
"What?"
"It's figuratively torture," he corrected. "Ponies that use the term literal when it should be figurative is a real pet peeve of mine. And to answer your question, yes, I am going to tell you my life story."
"Why?"
"Because," he leaned closer, "you and I are going to be spending a lot of time together. I thought that we might get to know each other better first. Now, would you like to know how I became Captain of the Royal Guard?"
"No. But I get the feeling I'm about to find out anyway."
"It wasn't by any merit on my part. It was a power play, by Princess Celestia. She already had Twilight as her star student. I should have known that it was no coincidence that Princess Cadance was made to be her foalsitter. I thought I was so clever in engaging in an illicit relationship with Cadance behind everypony's backs. I should have known that Celestia had arranged it from the start. Both to use it as a means of foisting me into the Guard, and to then arrange our marriage afterwards. It was Celestia's decree that netted me my promotion to Captain. All I had to do was show up and date her niece."
"I SO don't care!"
"That's fine," he assured her, "you don't have to care. You need only understand."
"Understand what?"
"The reason I'm telling you about my life story, is because I want to illustrate the difference in me because of you. In the biography of Prince Shining Armor, there will be a bright, red line, demarcating his life," he said in the third person, "Everything that happened before you, and then everything after you."
He turned and rolled the chair on its casters over to a small refrigerator, taking out a bottle of cider. He opened it and took a long sip as he rolled back over to her table.
"You made me learn a lot about myself, as a pony," he said. "I never knew true anger before I met you. Sure, I had gotten mad about things before. But they were all so trivial after you brainwashed me. I was pretty angry about that. I even thought that I hated you for it. But that didn't come until much later."
Shining Armor set his drink down on the edge of the large cart in the small space where the mirror had been. He pulled away the sheet covering the cart a little more, revealing a hoof-file.
"In the time since Thorax became the new changeling king, I earned my Hooficurist licence. Just for today. Would you like a hooficure?" he offered.
"No thank you."
"Oh, of course you do!" he said, shifting down to her hoof shackled beside her. He brought the file to the tip of her hoof. She tried to yank it away. "Now, now, be still." he said, tightening the restraint. "Cadance loves it when I do her hooves for her." He brought the file to the tip of her rough roof and began to gently service it. She would have been lying if she said that she didn't enjoy it.
"Now, as I was saying," Shining continued, "I was quite angry when I realized that you had brainwashed me, and deceived everypony. But in hindsight, I wouldn't say that I hated you. At least, not any more so than an enemy combatant while serving in the Royal Guard. You were simply my enemy. Routing your little invasion during my wedding, and sending you and your drones scattered to the wind was all the closure I needed for what you did to me." Shining made a few last strokes of the file, bringing her black chitin hoof to a glossy, mirror finish.
"There. Perfect," he said, blowing away any stray hoof dust. He held the mirror to show her. "I went to a semester of cosmetology school to learn how to perfect this art. Nice, right?" Chrysalis gave no reply, despite her hoof looking the best it ever had. "You wouldn't think it would take a year to learn how to file a hoof, but you would be surprised how much there is you need to know about the trade."
"Now... where was I?" he mused aloud. "Ah, yes, the wedding!" He resumed filing her hoof. "As I said, I felt that your defeat was adequate for what you had done to me personally. But then later, when I talked to my new bride, and my sister, my feelings on the matter changed. Like when Twilight told me that you had left her for dead in the crystal caves beneath Canterlot, just as you did to Cadance." He filed her hoof faster, and harder. "That was, of course, after you impersonated me, led Cadance to the caves, and violently RAPED her, disguised as me," he growled.
Chrysalis cried out in pain. The hoof file was stained with her blood.
"Ah, you see?" Shining said, pointing at the raw spot on her hoof. "This is what I'm talking about. You have to learn all kinds of important things like this in Cosmo school," he grinned. "You see, 'cosmo' is our nickname for cosmetology school. Since, you know, cosmetology is a bit of a mouthful. Heh heh." He pointed at her hoof again. "But yeah, this right here is a classic rookie mistake, filing too much. The hyponychium, informally known as the "quick", is the epithelium located beneath the hoof plate at the junction between the free edge and the skin of the hoof tip. And it is very sensitive." The queen gave him a quizzical look.
"I don't remember you being quite so knowledgeable, Mister Armor."
"Well, I also put myself through medical school since we last met." He stood up and put on a lab coat from a nearby hanger. And then a pair of latex hoof gloves. "So, actually, it's Doctor Armor now."
He moved the chair around the table to another hoof and began filing again.
"Officially I'm a neurologist. A pony that specializes in nerves. Which, by the way, your hooves have a ton of." He filed the second hoof much more aggressively this time, generating a lot of heat in her hoof. "But, I'm also a licensed surgeon. I had to take a lot of pony anatomy courses for that one."
Chrysalis squirmed what little she could on the table, feeling her hoof getting hotter, and the vibration of the file nearing her quick again.
"And with the help of King Thorax, and the cooperation of your- oh, I mean his hive, Equestrian medicine has learned a great deal about changeling anatomy as well. In fact, I was the first non-changeling doctor qualified to practice changeling medicine."
She grit her teeth as the file ground into her enervated flesh.
"Oopsie," Shining feigned. "Looks like I hit a vein with that one."
Shining stood up and walked over to the cart and peeled back the cloth a bit more, revealing a bag of powder. He brought it over to her hoof.
"Some Quikclot I brought from the Royal Guard. Stops almost any bleeding instantly. We don't want you bleeding out on me yet, now do we?" he asked. "The main ingredient works on contact with blood to immediately initiate the clotting process by activating factor XII. This reaction leads to the transformation of factor XII to its activated form XIIa, which instigates the rest of the coagulation cascade. Isn't medicine fascinating? And the best part is that it's virtually painless with equine blood. With changeling blood however-" He sprinkled the powder into her wound.
"It burns!" she howled.
"... the reaction is violently exothermic. But it still does the job of clotting your blood." He set the pouch of powder back on the cart. "We're going to need a lot more later."
Chrysalis's chest heaved as she panted while recovered from the pain in her hoof.
"So, yeah. After hearing about what you did to my sister and my wife, I was fairly livid," Shining continued, moving down to start aggressively filing one of her hind hooves. "It took Cadance a long time to be comfortable with being intimate with me again. Whenever she would look at me, all she could remember was what you did to her in those caves. And it took her a long time to get over you stealing her face and doing the same to me the night before the wedding." He stopped filing for a moment.
"Maybe she never really did..." He filed harder, putting his muscle into it as though he were sawing a log. "That was when my diffuse anger transformed into a targeted hatred. All of my thoughts were consumed with killing you." The file dug into the flesh of her hoof, hitting bone.
Chrysalis screamed in agony. Her eyes fluttered, skirting the edge of consciousness, overcome with shock.
"Ah, ah," Shining chided. He trotted over to the fridge and got out a couple I.V. bags and put them onto a stand. He wheeled it over to her and found a vein in her restrained arm. The larger of the two was a bag of changeling blood. The smaller, on a slow drip, "Adrenaline," he explained. Her eyes shot open with unnatural clarity. Her heart was racing. "We don't want you to pass out and miss the show, now do we?" Shining looked up above her. "Oh, silly me!" He pulled on a chain on the far wall, lowing a panel from the ceiling. He flipped the panel over on a axis in the middle, revealing a full-length mirror for her to see her entire body.
"There. Front row seats to the show." He sat down and applied some more Quikclot on her fresh wound.
"So, as I was saying, I'm a stallion of action, after all, ever since I joined the Guard. It was one of the virtues I managed to actually retain. I expressed my interest in pursuing you, to Cadance, shortly after the wedding. I wanted to scour the land, and hunt you unto the ends of the world to find and kill you."
He leaned back in his chair and sighed.
"But Cadance consoled me, and talked me out of it. She really is a wonderful, understanding mare. She reminded me of what was important. She and I had each other. And you weren't worth expending so much effort in the name of hate. And eventually, I came around to her way of thinking. I might have never forgiven you. But I could at least try to forget about you. And I very nearly did."
"Then- then why are you doing this!?" she cried. "My hive's been taken from me and I've been in hiding for years! I've forgotten all about conquest!"
"Shhh, shhh," he shushed her, stroking her head. "I know, I know." He lifted some more of the sheet away, taking a small bowl of finishing nails.
"You know, a lot of ponies have a misconception about torture," he said. "They think it's an effective means of extracting information from an enemy but it really isn't. It's a lot more effective to appeal to their desires, and convert them to your way of thinking, for them to want to actively help your cause." Where her protective chitin had been filed away, he pushed one of the small nails into her exposed flesh.
She wailed.
"With torture though, the victim will tell you whatever you want to hear to get you to stop. Even if it isn't true." He pushed in another nail.
She screamed.
"That makes it a terrible means of gathering information. In the end, all it is, is torture for torture's sake." Another nail. Another scream. "And not only that, but the way you see torture in books or movies is usually so unrealistic!" Another nail. "Like, I saw this mob movie, where they take a hammer and smash the guy's hoof!"
Chrysalis sucked in rapid breaths between her clenched teeth.
"No blood transfusions, adrenaline, or nothing. They just beat him with a hammer until he looks like mashed cranberries!" Shining reached under the sheet. "Oh, but don't worry," he brandished the heavy tool, "We'll get to meet Mr. Hammer later." He placed it back under the sheet with the other instruments. "My point is, he would have passed out right away, and then bled to death in a minute or two. So unprofessional!"
"You don't need to go straight into yanking teeth out with pliers, or disemboweling somepony to torture them..." he trailed off. "Torture... proper torture, is quite like making love, no? There's an art to it, a pacing, much like foreplay. There's so much you can do with just a hoof." His eyes roamed up her leg. "Before moving on to the more... interesting bits." He pushed another nail into her hoof's raw skin, forcing it into the bone. Her limb began to shake involuntarily from the pain. "Ugh, already?"
He walked over to the fridge and got out a syringe. He injected it into the I.V. line and her body stopped trembling.
"A mild paralytic. It doesn't stop your autonomous muscle systems, like your heart or lungs. But it'll keep you from twitching like a... bug."
"You are literally a monster!" she growled at him.
"Again, it's figuratively," he corrected. "And if anypony, it's you who is figuratively a monster. OOH! Speaking of monsters!-"
Shining trotted back over to the fridge and pulled out a large tray.
"Is that Tirek!?" Chrysalis gasped.
"Some of him," he said, placing the tray with Tirek's head on the table beside her head. He turned it to face her with his cold, lifeless eyes. His horns were severed, and head was covered in cuts, burns and abrasion injuries.
"I thought you might want some company," he said with a smile. "Funny thing, just before his... head died, he called me a monster too." He put his elbow on the head and leaned over her.
"You see Chrys, what I want you to understand, is how much effort I've put into this weekend for us. Because for the longest time, I was just sort of... drifting through life, without a real sense of purpose." Shining manipulated Tirek's mouth with his hooves. " 'Grrr crystals!' " he laughed as he imitated the gruff voice. "Heh, oh- no wait, that was the other guy," he chuckled. "But I mean it," Shining continued. "I was genuinely ready to let it go, my crusade to find you. Especially once..." he paused.
"Especially once I became a father."
He took a scalpel from the cart and a salt shaker. He made a little nick on her foreleg and sprinkled in some salt. And then another beside it, repeating the process for several more.
She growled and winced.
"You're a mother, right? I mean technically?" he asked, not really expecting an answer. "Ah, kids. They change your whole world. Am I right!? All your priorities change. All your worries. You just worry all the time about them. And the terrible twos... figuratively hell. But it never stops being worth it."
"Heh, she's going to start High School next year! Ah... the time flies." He sighed. "My little Flurry is my everything," he said. "There's nothing I wouldn't do for her. Ol' Tee here can tell you that," he said, pointing at Tirek's head. "And that was just for his little stunt, stealing my wife's magic and sending her to Tartarus. That put him on my... thing's to do list. And would you believe- would you believe that he even apologized for all the terrible things he did!? I mean, once I showed him all of the parts of him that I had cut off. Can you believe that though?" he asked. She looked away from him and the head. "Chryssi?" She ignored him. He grabbed her ear and quickly sawed it off with the scalpel while she shrieked. She shrieked again while he applied more Quikclot to her gushing head wound. She whipped her head back and glared at him while he spoke into her severed ear in his hoof. "Can you hear me now?"
"Bastard!" she yelled.
"Oh, good, you can hear me. I wanted to make sure that you were paying attention. You see, because I was talking about the joys of parenthood, and I was hoping you could relate, since you're a mother." He stuck her severed ear onto Tirek's head with a finishing nail where one of his ears used to be. "Which is why you and I are here now. Because we're parents. Thorax told me how ready you were to kill one of your own children." He added more cuts and salt to her limb. "I realized how easily you would have killed my innocent, infant daughter. My little filly, who means everything to me. You would have killed her, and you would have felt nothing!"
"And this is the part I really want to emphasize. Because I could have gone the rest of my life as a prince and a father, and forget all about that awful chapter in my life with you and the wedding. I could have let that go. I could have spent the rest of my life being a fat, lazy prince, and just focus on raising my daughter."
He put down the scalpel and salt on the cart.
"But no. You couldn't stay gone. You just had to come back and try to take over. You kidnapped the princesses, my wife and I. My sister and her friends. But you crossed the fucking line when you threatened my daughter!"
Shining peeled away the rest of the sheet, revealing all of the various tools. The hammer, pliers, a hacksaw, a drill, a corkscrew, a cheese grater, bolt cutters, a blow torch, a large battery, lye, and all sorts of grotesque things that she didn't even recognize. The lower shelf of the cart had all sorts of other medical supplies like tourniquets, suture threads & needles, gauze and bandages. The fridge was stocked with enough donated changeling blood to bleed her dry three times over and still keep her alive, and enough epinephrine to make sure she was awake for every moment of it.
"I really should thank you, after all," he said. "It was because of you I went back to school. Because of you I spent years learning anatomy and even earning a doctorate, just for today. Just to be able to know how to keep you alive, while you beg for the sweet release of death. And it was because of YOU that I broke into Tartarus and kidnapped Tirek. Just so I could practice torturing somebody to death." He picked up Tirek's head. "Yeah, mister tough guy," he said to the head, "that was all you were to me. Practice. And we learned so much about pain and suffering, didn't we?" Shining smiled, putting the head back down.
"So, yeah, I'm not the 'great and pure Captain of the Royal Guard'. And I'm not the badass warrior you thought I was, either. Whatever badass shit you heard I did, you really need some context, because pretty much my whole life, pretty much right up until that day, my default setting had been half-assed, but that was before I had a foal, a foal YOU threatened to harm! So imagine, as I literally torture you to death — hang on — yeah, literally, that a giant hoof has turned my dial from half-assed to quadruple-assed!"
"That day, when I escaped from that pod in your hive, as my wife cradled our infant beside me, and I saw you standing there..." he shuddered and composed himself. "It took every ounce of self-control to not grab you right then and there with my magic and rip you in half! I felt something wash over me when you flew away that day. It was so much worse than anger, or even the seething hatred..." He leaned over her and whispered into her ragged ear hole.
"It was a darkness that filled me. Cold and calm darkness." He leaned back and ran his hoof over the tools on the bench. "It was this darkness that stayed my hoof from killing you quickly right then and there. It gave me the patience to bide my time, even now, to not kill you yet. It washed away my anger, and my hate. And now, I feel only nothing for you. I will kill you, and I will feel nothing."
"Will that give you satisfaction, my prince?" she hissed. "Killing me, strapped to a table?"
"The killing? No. No satisfaction." Chrysalis gulped as he picked up the blow torch and ignited it.
"Everything leading up to the killing, though..." his lips peeled back into a terrifying grin, "... i̪̮̞s̝ ̥̤g͈̠̱̦̱͎͉̖̙o̼͇̩̭̲̺̳ṉ̥͈͈̲͇n̞ḁ ͔b͕e̤̖͇̩̝̼ ͖̞̻̣̙͇̪̱a͍̝̣̟ ̫̺̘̱̺͇̖͉g̱̬̬a͓͚̯̣̪̟̗̰s̖͕̖̻̥̱!"
