Something Sweet To Bite: Candy Mare Goes to Hell

The closer she drew to the throne room, the quieter the screams of the damned became, until they were nothing more than hushed whispers just on the edge of her hearing.

Of course everything from the floor to the ceiling was still composed of their skinned forms, but this was the core of the castle, the very foundation of this realm, and the souls that occupied it had suffered much longer than those that made up the exterior. Occasionally they wept, or grimaced in silence, but their voices had long since worn away. The event horizon of their existence had dwindled to a single point of unending agony which they had no choice but to endure, awaiting an oblivion that would never come. As the former earth pony made her way down the blood slicked corridor, the broken spirits barely acknowledged her presence.

A thick green fog hovered just above the contorted flesh and bone of the floor, swirling into strange shapes as her legs passed through the unnatural mist. The creeping haze was, of course, an indication of her presence, the one the former farm pony knew was awaiting her just a little further ahead. It had always been an extension of her will, made manifest, muffling and amplifying sounds at her will to confuse her victims. It also hid her deadly presence until it was far too late to escape. The fog wheeled and swirled around her hooves like an affectionate pet welcoming its master home and, although the thought sickened her, she felt herself oddly comforted by its presence. Strange how we take solace from the most awful and terrifying things from out past with just a little bit of nostalgia.

As she continued to trudge down the maddeningly twisted halls, the fog guided her steps. She climbed stairs that let out onto empty balconies, opened doors that led to nowhere, and found herself crossing and recrossing the same room over and over even though she had been walking in a straight line the entire time. Even so, she was confident she was not being led astray. It seemed that the being that lurked at the center of this living nightmare was eager to meet with her as well.

At last she came to a steep set of stairs. The victims here were so old that they had shriveled into mummies, their insubstantial muscle desiccated to the point that they just barely clung to their brittle bones. The occasional twitch and exhalation were the only indication that they, like the rest of the tormented victims here, were still very much aware. A sigh of stale air, putrid and weighted with the passage of long epochs, gusted up from below as a pair of massive doors slowly creaked open at the bottom of the stairs. The scent that swept forth from within threatened to overwhelm her. The wet earthy stench of rotting pumpkin mixed with the acrid reek of decayed flesh long gone to dust assaulted her nostrils, making her cough. A fitful flickering light rose from the doorway, causing the fog to dance with obscene shadows that twisted and warped the rictus grins of the dead.

Inside, something was calling to her - had been calling to her for a long, long time, though she had tried so hard to deny it.

She could always turn back.

This was not her first journey to this castle, nor the first time she had uncovered these truths about herself, yet always before, she had turned away before reaching this final chamber.

Something was different this time though, something had changed.

She needed to know what it was. Why it was.

No more running away.

The unnatural mare clambered down the stairs, taking them in twos, and ran through the open door before she could change her mind. However, what awaited her on the other side instantly made her heart sink.

The throne room was enormous, cavernous, extending as far as the eye could see in almost every direction. Within it was a pile, like unto a mountain, of raw red skulls rising up so that they extended through a massive hole in the ceiling. Though all flesh had long since been stripped away, they still were soaked in blood, and steadily wept the substance from the empty staring eye sockets. Indeed, the floor was covered in a vast lake of blood and viscera, a few errant skulls bobbing in the waist high liquid. As the mare waded through the sticky ichor, she couldn't help but notice that it was still warm as it splashed up her legs and sprayed across her face.

She clambered onto an island of skulls that seemed to be the base of the mountainous pile. High atop the enormous cairn of bone, there sat a twisted throne forged not only in flesh but in confection as well. Pulsing and throbbing organs were laced through with hunks of peppermint, lumps of gingerbread, and glistening bars of chocolate. Faces twisted by pain and horror, leered out, half agonized flesh and half dripping candy, eyes swirled with lunacy at the insanity of their very existence. It wasn't much of surprise that the throne was made from children, not even tiny foals having been spared, but even so the former earth pony was taken aback by the audacity and wrongness of the throne's construction. Of all the horrible things she had seen so far there was something especially perverse about the candified corpses of all the little fillies and colts, mixed in with the tiny squirming foals, softly crying beneath a coating of frosting and sprinkles.

As horrible as the throne itself was, it was nothing compared to the horror of its occupant.

The creature that held court here was one she had not laid eyes on before this moment, yet she recognized it instantly. Its body was a chaotic collection of cacophonous colored candy clashing calamitously with causality itself, radiating waves of corruption that twisted and distorted everything around it on a physical, mental, and spiritual level. A long red and black liquorice whip mane hung limply from its skull, falling like a lifeless waterfall down the mountain of skulls. Eyes that were a kaleidoscopic swirl of madness and malice gazed malignantly down upon the unnatural farm pony as if she were just one more skull waiting to join the pile. The monster's mouth was cracked in a wide and terrible grin that threatened to part the top of its head from the rest of its body, lined with crooked candy corn teeth that only partially held back a cascade of acidic green drool.

Every inch of the beast was alive with crawling, hideous vermin, writhing maggots, and slithering worms. Twitching antenna wiggled from between its teeth and beneath its eyelids, as millions of scuttling little legs clicked and clattered as they swarmed over her wet and glistening form. This thing was a rotting, putrescent, blood soaked abomination that had absolutely no right to exist.

Worst of all, the creature the mare gazed upon was in many ways herself.

It was her twisted mirror image.

Her reflection.

Herself.

In her heart of hearts, this was what she knew, this creature reflected what she had become.

"I've come a long way to see you." the former pony began haltingly. "It has taken a long time for me to... Accept what this place has been trying to tell me. Hunger does strange things to you. Warps your body and your mind. To know true starvation, that sense that drives all living things to destroy in order to survive, to know it in its purest and most absolute form is to touch the very heart of madness. You can hunger for so many things aside from food. You can hunger for freedom. For love, for revenge, for destiny. I thought I could be rid of it finally, but even that was a hunger in and of itself. I betrayed my own kind, trying to satisfy my hunger. Since then, I've just steadily been starving away, trying to will you out of existence. But the things you did, the horrible crimes you committed, they need to be paid for. We need to be punished. That's why we are here."

The figure on the throne remained silent, staring, as if it had not heard anything that the mare had said. Only the vermin that crawled over her body gave the illusion of life in her lifeless form. Even so, A reply drifted from the dark.

"Is that seriously what you've taken away from this creep show? Yeash, If this place reflects how you truly see yourself, how you truly see me, no wonder we had so many problems. I've noticed that this Hell is marvelous at gas-lighting losers. Every last sucker here seems to be convinced that there's some kind of justice in punishment, but really all you're doing is satisfying your own twisted desires. The only reason you think we need to be punished is because it's easier than taking responsibility for our actions and owning up to the desires that drove them."

"That's not true!" shouted the former mare nearly weeping, stamping her hooves on the pile of skulls, making a hollow percussive sound. "Look at this place! This monument to murder! This castle of pain! Every twisted soul here is one of our victims! They exist in a state of perpetual torment because of what we did to them! Accepting punishment is accepting responsibility for what we did! What... what we both did. Because you wouldn't let me go! Your gluttony, your greed, your hunger just wouldn't be satisfied unless you drug me down with you!"

The unseen voice moaned, sounding more exasperated than angry.

"Okay, well first off, these shadows and phantoms you feel so bad for aren’t the real deal. The only soul suffering here is you, and that is precisely what you want. I certainly didn’t send you here, that was a choice you made when you decided to side with that bacon-haired tart and try to destroy me. Secondly, I didn’t have any say in where any of the other souls floated off to once they left my grasp, so any of them that might be down here somewhere are here because of what they did, not thanks to me!"

"I don't understand, what are you talking about?" the teary eyed former pony asked, genuinely confused.

Another groan of agitation drifted down from the ceiling.

"I did not miss this, you know? When are you finally going to wake up and realize that it was never about me and you. It was about us. It was what we wanted. It was what we did. Hell, would you listen to me? I'm stuck in here with you now and you've already got me twisting my words around just to satisfy your ego. You are so maddening! When are you going to realize the truth!?"

"And what truth is that?" asked the unnatural earth pony, her bitter black tears sizzling as they slipped from her candy-coated eyes.

"That there never was a 'Pumpkin Patch' and a 'Candy Mare'. This sad obsession you have with our duality needs to come to an end." replied the voice as something shifted in the darkness on the ceiling. "We have always been one and the same."

"...What?" she had not expected to hear that.

"Yeah, that's enough of this skulking in shadows nonsense." the Candy Mare descended like a spider from above. As she came to rest next to the throne, the bugs and larva squirming on the enthroned effigy of herself squealed and tried to slither away, revealing the monster on the throne to be the exaggerated and lifeless doll it was. "Would you just look at this ugly thing. I mean, I knew you hated me. Yourself. Whatever. But come on, we're not that ugly."

"What!?" she had really not expected to hear that!

"I know, I know, pronouns are such a bitch, right? He, she, they, them, you, me, us; it's all just so much drivel." remarked the real Candy Mare with a shrug, shoving the marionette of herself off of the throne so that it clattered down the slope of skulls and into the pool of blood below. She took a seat, crossing her legs and leaning back into the plush chocolate dipped infant flesh. "Frankly I've always thought it was kind of a waste of time to try and get them right when most of the folks I bump into I end up eating. Just this once, I really wish that the ponish language was a little more precise, ya know?"

"No, not that!" protested the filly, her candy shell cracking as she stomped her hooves angrily once more. "Well, wait, yes that too but... wait, who are you again?"

"Like I said, I'm you." the candied version of herself answered flatly. "Sort of have been all along, although neither one of us has wanted to admit it up until now. I mean clearly you sort of knew, otherwise you wouldn't have conjured up all of this torture you've been putting yourself through. This stupid mountain of skulls, the castle made of murdered souls, the tour of some of my greatest hits, the whole endless gnawing hunger and the guilt you feel from indulging yourself. I mean, the demons here are pretty much all idiots, they could have never come up with such an elaborate meat-grinder to force you through. I like the throne by the way. Making a seat of power out of Lemon Drop's victims makes a lot of sense, but I really hope you don't blame yourself for their deaths. Neither of us had any control over what happened to them.”

"Wait, so none of this..." As realization dawned, the mare's candy shell began to flake away. Just another false identity that was now falling away. "None of this is real?"

"Real? Nah, not even close! Although it's probably as close to real as anything else in this ghastly little realm, I expect. A sad fantasy cooked up by the guilty conscience of trillions of lost souls, exploited by parasites called demons to make you your own personal judge, jury and executioner." the Candy Mare shifted her position to drape herself across the faces of the tormented children that made up her make-believe throne. "Though since you lot are already dead, every time you died it just reset the scenario. It's a good thing I remembered the trick to dream walking I picked up from Princess Luna, otherwise we wouldn't be having this little chat right now."

"So you... You're the real deal?" asked Pumpkin Patch as the last of her candy shell flaked away. Beneath this last false self-image there was the ghost of a little filly with curly red hair and a cutie mark shaped like a pumpkin with a square patch sown into the side. The spirit of Lemon Drop's final victim stared up with bright green eyes that flashed with something between horror and hope. "You are the real Candy Mare!? That's impossible! Sunset Shimmer destroyed you when she burned up what was left of my body!"

"Ah, so you finally remember everything huh? Yeah, that's not exactly what went down, though I guess you've missed out on a lot while you've been trapped down here." mused the Candy Mare, stroking her chin thoughtfully. "I kind of already had a few new bodies cooking in the dimension Sunset called home, new hosts, that sort of thing. Your body might have been destroyed but the curse lived on! Truthfully that little stunt where you stabbed me in the back barely slowed me down. I'm not even mad about it anymore. I mean, how can I stay mad at myself?"

"I'm not you!" roared the filly, her spectral scream sending waves of blood crashing on distant bony shores as it rose to a banshee wail. "We are not the same!"

"Are you kidding? Everything about this nightmare you cooked up absolutely screams ‘You are the Candy Mare! Feel bad about yourself!’ I saw how you looked when I first got in here, it was like looking at a less attractive and weepy version of myself! This is all about you and your own guilt." replied the dream-walker snidely, rolling over on her back so her head and long mane hung upside down from the throne. "That's what you have always harbored since we came to be the way we are, you know? The guilt. You are the part of us that regrets what we've done, what we've become. The part that still has a conscience. You've always been looking for a way to run away even though you know deep down that we had no choice in the path we walked. I can't say I've really missed having you chirping away at the back of my mind but a minute ago, when you were practically weeping at the realization of who you were, I gotta say I felt a little sorry for you. I truly can't stand to see what has become of you since we've been apart. You don't deserve any of this. What you are doing to yourself is just absurd! You've gotten yourself so twisted up there's hardly any difference between us anymore, except you feel bad about it."

"And you don't?"

"Of course I don't! Haven't you been paying attention?" replied the Candy Mare with a bark of laughter. "I'm the part that wants revenge! The bit that embraces the curse! I’m that part of you that wants to live, and live, and live, and live no matter what the cost! I want to burn it all down until there is nothing left! Screw punishing myself, its everyone else that deserves to suffer for what was done to us!"

"Then you're even sadder than I am!" shot back the shade of Pumpkin Patch, defiantly. "Maybe you are right, maybe I don't deserve to be tortured for all of eternity, but neither does everyone else! I... We were not the only innocents that suffered. You know that not everyone you punished deserved it. You should have been punished, at least for that!"

"Nah, that would've just been a colossal waste of time." dismissed the mad mare, languidly.

"Why!? Why after everything you've done do you believe that!?" screamed the spirit, furious at her candied counterparts attitude.

"Because, like I said, I can't feel any remorse for what I've done. Not really. I can think it, and I can act it, but I can't feel it. You are the part that can do all of that." the dream walker sat back up with a shrug. "I kind of have the feeling there are a lot of damned souls in this place that have the same problem. No matter how much they are punished, they will never truly understand what they have done or feel an ounce of remorse for it. We will never get any better. We will never improve. We have to get ourselves together. We have to reintegrate who we are before any of this could hope to have any meaning."

"I don't... I don't understand"

"Well, for us, it boils down to you and me. We have to stop being you and me."

"We're dead right?" asked the shade of Pumpkin Patch thoughtfully. "If we really are the same person then why are we separate?"

"Because I'm not dead. You are the soul. Currently I think I am what passes for the body." The Candy Mare rubbed her face as if she were feeling it for the first time. "What a role reversal, am I right? Worst of all, since I'm not linked to you right now, I'm hooked up with Lemon Drop! Of all the horrible punishments, inflicting him on me again is probably the worst one this afterlife could have cooked up for me! Chances are I could have just joined with him, but could you imagine that sick deviant with my powers at his disposal?"

The very idea made Pumpkin Patch shiver. "Lemon Drop is here too?" asked the spirit, a tremor of deep fear in her voice.

"Yeah. Why, are you surprised? Did you think he was going to go off to 'little pony heaven' after everything he did? As a matter of fact, he's sort of why I'm down here. It's a weird development, but apparently if they destroy him that's it for me, I'm gone for good."

"Hold on. If you are me, and you get wiped out of existence then... what happens to me?"

"Honestly? I don't know."

Suddenly the mountain of skulls was gone, as was the cavern, the pool of warm blood, and even the castle. There were just two lights in the dark now, one a soft orange glow at the center of which was a tiny filly while the other a garish green held her perfect double cast in candy.

A numbing chill was spreading in from all around. The dream was breaking down.

"What is going on? Why is it so cold."

"We're in Hell, Pumpkin. A special part right at the bottom where it's freezing cold. You've been trapped here dreaming for a long, long time, feeding perverted demons who get off on your suffering. I came to get you but, hah, wouldn't ya know there's no way to get out again. Not for an incomplete being like me." the soul light of the Candy Mare pulsed a haunting green as she spoke, like a firefly hovering in the twilight. "The only way out of here is for us to work together."

"Why should I help you?" Pumpkin Patch's soul light flickered back, a warmer glow like a lantern guiding the lost and weary home.

"Easy, you'd be helping yourself. Or does being tortured for the rest of eternity to feed the addiction of pain-junky devils really appeal that much to you?"

"I don't trust you."

"Cool, I don't trust you either. But I guess that's something we'll have to work on. Then again, when we are truly one and the same again, I don't think it will even matter anymore. Instead of thinking of us as one or the other, we will both simply be who we are, for good or ill." The verdant spectral orb flashed dimmer, subsiding. "I'll have to think of us both as myself, I guess."

"You mean I'll have to think of both as myself." beamed the warm glow, drifting closer. "I was here first after all."

"Yeah, I remember. I also remember a time before you though, when I was just a loose collection of spells and souls thanks to Lemon Drop. Reconciling that is going to take some time."

"I... Think I can understand that. We both went through a lot before we were us. I'm a complicated pony, aren't I?"

"I sure am.”

The two lights grew closer, brighter, as they started to finally overlap.

"Candy Mare?"

"Yeah Pumpkin?"

"Let's get the hell out of here.”