Magical horses and the anti-magical rod

The silence in your house is so thick you can almost cut it with a knife and spread it over the slice of bread in front of you. Almost, but not quite, so you decide to use cheese instead.

Slowly, trying to not make any noise, you cut a thin slice off the cheese block. You almost succeed, but the treacherous cheese throws an air bubble under your knife during the last quarter of an inch of your perfectly silent ninja cut. The knife meets no resistance, briefly accelerates downwards under your constant pressure, and hits the cutting board with a loud "THWAP".

Twilight's eye twitches. You freeze, and hold your breath, expecting to be incinerated, or worse. After a few seconds, you take a risk of breathing again. Twilight's eyes are not glowing, which is good. Occasional tongues of flame are still running through her mane, which is not so good. You wonder if you could use that flame to grill your cheese.

Crap, the slice of bread is slightly larger than the slice of cheese, so now you have to decide if you want to eat an incomplete sandwich with at least 20% of it not covered by anything, or risk your life again by cutting one more slice. Of course, you know there is only one right answer to this dilemma. This time, however, you know about the air bubble near the bottom, so you cut at least twice slower than before. So slow, in fact, that your knife becomes stuck in the cheese block. Shit.

You try to pull the knife out, accidentally lifting the cheese and the cutting board that stuck to it. You realize what's going to happen, but fail to react in time. As if in slow motion, the heavy wooden cutting board gets unstuck from the cheese block and falls on the table with a thunderous "THUMP". Your heart stops. The block of cheese follows shortly after, falling back on the board and adding its own "SHMAK" to your death sentence. For a moment, you think about diving under the table, but instead of exploding, Twilight exhales and speaks in a very quiet and tired voice

"Just make your stupid sandwich already."

You are waiting for the royal guards. The remaining sleeping ponies from your pile are teleported upstairs (where they should not be because that's where all your personal shit is stored), and placed on your actual bed that you haven't touched in weeks. The awake ones are helping with the damage control outside, not daring to even take a peep into your house, which currently contains a very pissed off princess, you, and two incapacitated ponies. On one of the mattresses previously occupied by the pile lies one slightly convulsing black mare with the silliest happy smile on her face. She is probably producing a lot of happy noises, but you can't really tell since Twilight put a sound-proof bubble around her. On another mattress lies a bright purple-ish unicorn you never saw before, who apparently was hit by an 'anti elder dragon' grade paralyze spell at the beginning of the fight (that mushroom cloud), but saw the entire thing, and now she follows your every move with her eyes. You are not sure if her face is also paralyzed, or you should start getting worried about the expression that she is giving you. Of course, you could un-paralyze the mare in a second, but something tells you that you should let Twilight's counterspells slowly do the job instead.

After Twilight broke the silence (technically you did that too, but it totally doesn't count) you feel more confident about talking to her, so very carefully you ask "How much trouble I'm in?"

In response, Twilight looks at you with... disgust?

"Anon, you sexually assaulted a mare. Doing this to somepony without their consent is beyond wrong. You are a rapist, Anon. This time you are going to jail."

Ah, wait, so that's what this all is about? Finally, you have been waiting for years for the right opportunity to point your finger at your opponent during a legal dispute and shout

"OBJECTION!" You stand up and walk towards the kitchen drawers. From there, you recover a fat stack of papers, take the top one, and pass it to Twilight.

"This is where you are wrong. Here I have written consents from every single mare from yesterday's pile," you say, "I am allowed to perform sexual activities on them for the next 24 hours including, but not limited to, vaginal penetration, oral penetration, anal penetration, simultaneous penetration ..." you start reciting the list from the memory. Noticing the look Twilight is giving you, you cut the list short

"..., etc. They are also agreeing that if they are to enter a state in which they represent a danger to those around them, I'm allowed to subdue them in a non-life-threatening manner." Sure, you look like a complete idiot, but proper and explicit consent before the wild orgy is important, every true gentleman knows that! Twilight looks at you with a lot of doubt.

"I also read the terms and conditions out loud every evening before we start, just so that every mare knows exactly what she is signing for."

"That's true, he totally does, and it is as boring as it sounds," says a chirpy voice from the ceiling. Both you and Twilight look up. Roseluck is watching both of you from the ceiling fan and looks amused. Twilight's eye twitches once again, and she just continues to read the paper with a long list of signatures below the text, pretending that nothing had happened. You sort of hope that the missile-barrage mare was dumb enough to use her real name and her real signature there. Not like you don't have enough witnesses, but you always wanted to win at least one legal argument in your life in a spectacular manner. Your grandfather was a lawyer.

"Look, accidents happen. After one mare almost broke another mare's muzzle for licking her pussy without asking, we are all agreeing on some ground rules here before we start. I wasn't raping anyone, I was finishing my job. Anonymous — one, another ancient curse — zero. This mare will wake up being a happy member of society, and everything will be sunshine and rainbows."

You are trying to look confident, but notice how the mentioned mare arches her back in another wave of orgasms, "I mean after Luna wakes her up. I might have gone a little bit too far this time around."

Now Twilight looks just sad but not openly hostile anymore.

"Anon, you don't understand what you are dealing with. There was no curse on Sneaky Strike, there were no demons, and she is not another Nightmare Moon," you notice how Twilight's intonation changes. You wouldn't expect this one from a dorky ex-librarian princess, but you heard it from one of your friends back on Earth. That friend spent several years in Afghanistan.

"There are monsters in this world who are just evil, Anon. They enslave, rape, and even kill just because that's who they are. You can't blast them with the Elements and make the corruption go away. You can't befriend them or reform them. But even they deserve a second chance, so we send them to Tartarus, hoping that one day something will allow them to change."

Twilight leans a bit closer, and the temperature in the room drops by a few degrees.

"We never cut their horns off, though. You don't have even the slightest idea what a mare must do to deserve this sentence nowadays. Sneaky Strike is much worse than any monster, Anon."

You shiver and look over your shoulder at the blissful mare. Was she a psycho? Did she torture anyone? No matter how much you try, you just can't imagine how this tiny fluffy pony can possibly be worse than something like that Tirek guy you heard about.

"To confirm that the soul is beyond redemption, a circle of mages performs a deep soul scrying ritual on a suspect. If even one of them finds a possible timeline in which the soul can be reformed, the sentence is replaced with a softer one. Princess Celestia insisted that as a young princess I must participate in a ritual once."

Twilight's voice drops even lower.

"I saw her soul, Anon, there is nothing to save, it's rotten to the core."

You let the information to sink in. You process it. You come to a conclusion that reflects all your combined experience with Equestria, ponies, and the unhealthy amount of anime that you have watched over your lifetime.

"Bullshit. No pony is beyond redemption. We both saw what we saw, there was a monster, I fucked it out of her, and I bet you 20 that if you perform your dumb ritual again, you'll see that the problem is gone, and this mare is no more evil than an average kitten. You owe me one, Twi, and I'm collecting the debt now. Can you perform the ritual alone?"

Twilight looks at you like you've lost your mind. The heroic pose that you are currently maintaining may have something to do with that.

"No, but I can perform the basic version with Starlight's help."

At your questioning face, she points a hoof at the paralyzed mare, who looks at you with... admiration? You walk towards her, pick her up and give her a strong hug, confident that it will break whatever spell was cast on her. Then you shake her a few times and place her on her hooves. She looks very surprised to be able to stand.

"Come on, do it before the guards are here," you say as you sit down and finally take a bite on your sandwich. Damn, this cheese is really good.

Two mares are talking to each other in some egghead language for a few minutes, and then the laser show starts. Glowing symbols are flying around, Twilight's eyes are completely white again, but this Starlight girl looks even more eldritch than Twilight as glowing runes start to pop up all over her body, and her mane etherealizes. Shit, is she some sort of a secret mega-wizard or something? You know other unicorns can't make their manes be like that, you asked them to roleplay Celestia on multiple occasions.

Finally, the air around the black unicorn's body starts to glow. You sort of understand what you are looking at: that's a pony's soul made visible to a naked eye. Except for this one sort of looks like cheese, with a lot of large empty bubbles. You also remember that one time when you bought some raw potatoes, and then they started to sprout, so you spent half an hour carefully cutting out all the bad parts out of them, which made them look sort of like asteroids full of craters. Yeah, something in-between that and cheese. You hold your half-eaten sandwich in front of you for the comparison and make a conclusion that "cheesy soul" should be a perfectly valid scientific description for the condition you are observing.

Twilight and the witch mare can see much more in their trance, of course. They are probably seeing futures where this mare chases butterflies, rolls in the grass, or sings happy songs. At least that's what you think a good soul should look like under this "deep soul scrying" thing. Hoping that they don't see futures where the black mare burns houses down, steals candies from foals or puts the toilet paper the wrong way, you make another sandwich for Roseluck who is still perched on your ceiling fan (how?!), she seems to be enjoying the light show quite a lot.

The ritual comes to an end, and two mares continue their egghead chit-chat. When it stops, Twilight lifts the black mare with her telekinesis and walks towards you with a very lost expression on her face. You meet her with the widest shit-eating grin in your arsenal.

"Let me guess, all the rotten parts are gone?"

Silently, Twilight opens her saddlebag, counts 20 bits, places them on the table, and leaves your house with still orgasming Sneaky Strike floating behind her. The other witch mare stops before the door and turns towards you

"You should stay at home until further notice. Thank you for your assistance. And for what you said earlier." Huh?

After that, she leaves too.

Wait, how long should you wait for this further notice? Oh well, not like you have anything better to do anyway.

The sandwich was good, but now you are thirsty. You take one of the totally unhealthy soda bottles Rarity bought for you, open it and bring it close to your mouth to take a sip. You feel like someone is watching you with disapproval but see nopony around. You take a sip. The look of disapproval intensifies. You look up and see Roseluck, one of her crotchboobs is dangling again, and it looks full.

"Want me to help you with these?" you ask pointing a finger at her boobs.

"Yes, please," she says, outstretching her forelegs towards you so you can lift her from the fan more easily. You take her from there, and after petting her for a while to let her relax in your hands, you start sucking her nipple carefully. This time she is not unconscious, so she just snuggles against your chest with a happy smile. The magnificent taste of her milk is million times better than the soda crap you almost drank instead.

"Say, Roseluck. Am I a rapist monster?" you ask her out of a sudden. Roseluck looks surprised by the question.

"I don't know, you tell me. What were you thinking about when you were humping that mare?" You are not entirely sure how to answer.

"About how I screwed up again. About protecting Twilight. About Rarity and how a mare like her can even exist. About how wrong it is for a little fuzzy creature with a cute butt to make monologues about enslaving the nation. About fucking her senseless too. Say, are you not afraid of me?"

Roseluck chuckles.

"Lilly practically dragged me here yesterday. I guess she got tired of my panic attacks, and it was either this, or she forces me to find another house. I was terrified of you, of course. But then, I was always afraid of everything. Darkness. Strangers."

You are confused.

"I woke up in the middle of the night, on top of your pile, and... for the first time in as long as I remember, the world felt different. It was dark, but I wasn't afraid of any monsters lurking out there. It's like the whole world suddenly became, I don't know, friendlier? I always wanted to stay at home and hide from everypony, but tonight I wanted to explore, to go places and meet ponies. Maybe climb a high tree or something. But then I noticed these," she gestures towards her crotchboobs, which are now a lot more manageable, since you are almost done with sucking them dry, "and decided to start with something simpler until they are back to normal."

She looks at your ceiling fan.

"For example, I was always terrified of high places. And I just wanted to do something I was never able to do before." Huh, this sort of makes sense, sometimes mares fucked by your get these moments of clarity in the night, but you are still very confused.

"It feels so nice to be in control of the situation. To know that you are not going to fall. And even if you will, it's going to be fine. The world is not trying to kill you; it just sits there, waiting to be explored. The view from up there is also nice." Roseluck smirks. "For example, I know that Applejack woke up at dawn like she always does. She was just chilling under the pile with her eyes half-open, enjoying herself, until you woke up too."

Shit, so she held your head like that on purpose, and could release you at any moment? Why is your cock getting hard again? Is being dominated by mares your new kink? Hmm...

Roseluck purrs as you absent-mindedly ruffle her chest and belly fluff with your fingers. You let them wander a bit lower, stroking the space between her boobs. Such an innocent, fluffy creature, completely melted under your fingertips. But technically an earth pony, which means she can probably punch a hole through your ribs with her tiny fluffy hoof. But you know she never will, nopony will because that's not who ponies are. Except for a few of them, the ones with rotten souls.

You think about stuff. The important stuff. The actual questions that matter.

"But if you were full of milk and half-asleep, how did you climb on top of my ceiling fan?"

A loud knock on the door breaks your conversation.

"Who's there?" you ask.

"WE ARE ASKING QUESTIONS HERE!"

Oh shit, it's the royal guard. In the end, Twilight decided to fuck you too.