Something Sweet To Bite: Candy Mare Goes to Hell

To the Candy Mare, a tour of Hell with Lemon Drop was about as dreary as things could get.

To be clear, after the she had been spat out of Limbo, she had ended up in a part of the Realm Infernal reserved for those who had been lustful in life. This inadvertently led massive overcrowding as, apparently, there were few creatures alive that had never experienced a lustful thought or engaged in lustful deeds. The punishment was the incorporeality that the Candy Mare had observed early when trying to devour the shades that had been damned here. What it was meant to accomplish wasn't anything protective of course, but rather the wraiths were forbidden to touch or be touched, yet constantly yearned for that sensation. To make matters worse, the sinners were surrounded by constant temptation as the souls of other desperate offenders swirled about in the smoke and heat trying to hold one another.

As The Candy Mare grew familiar with the realm she came to recognize several tornadoes on the horizon for what they truly were, lustful souls spinning around and around one another, in the vain attempt at what amounted to an unsuccessful ghost orgy. She sneered at the storm of desperation that kicked up the dust all around her. Such whiny, pathetic whelps. She was almost glad she hadn't been able to eat them after all. There was no telling where they had been.

“Hell has rules.” intoned Lemon Drop, interrupting her thoughts. Ever the one to show off his superiority, even in Hell, the ghostly unicorn couldn't help but take the opportunity to demonstrate his lofty knowledge of this lowly realm. “We are forced to abide by these rules as we travel. Pay heed to step where I step, for there are many who have wandered off the beaten path, who have become lost to the things that lurk beyond.”

“Don’t try to scare me, Lemon Drop.” the Candy Mare chided. “In case you’ve forgotten, I am the thing that goes ‘bump’ in the night. I doubt there’s anything out there more terrible than me.”

“Perhaps not, under normal circumstances.” agreed the unicorn with a disconcerting gleam in his eyes. “But these are far from normal circumstances.”

As they crossed out of the realm of howling winds and shrieking spirits, a change came over the weather. A thin, putrid rain began to fall, churning the ground into a frigid slurry. The grey rain made the terrain far colder than it should be, especially as the mud slid up the Candy Mare’s legs, thanks in large part to the relatively hotter realm the pair of ponies had just exited. The unnatural downpour didn’t dissolve the Candy Mare’s sugary flesh, as normal water might have, given enough exposure, but there were other significant drawbacks as the stinking liquid plastered her mane and tail against her body and slowed their advance to a crawl.

All around there were shades likewise lodged in the filthy mire. They wallowed in stinking puddles, each sinner clearly rotted and bloated with putrescence that seemed to devour them from the inside. The explanation for their condition was readily apparent, as The Candy Mare watched a few of the wraiths actively shovel the muddy slurry straight into their mouths. That was bad enough, but on closer inspection the muddy slop was alive with maggots, beetles, and other vermin that crept and crawled, and clearly ate the damned from the inside out. The mad mare watched in disgust as their jaws dislocated to swallow more and more of the insect laden slurry. The bellies of the gluttonous spirits distended with all the foulness that they had shoved down their throats, yet as their stomachs engorged, their hunger seemed to only grow greater! Their need becoming sharper as they worked themselves into an feeding frenzy before her eyes!

As the candy ghoul watched, one swollen gut after another burst wide open sending bloated intestines, squirming with parasites, flopping into the mud. More than one shade engaged in a horrible display of auto-cannibalism, stuffing their own intestines into their mouths in an effort to appease their unnatural hunger.

Unbelievably, despite how revolting the sight was, the Candy Mare had to fight hard not to join the sinners in their self destructive feast. It wasn’t that the reeking slurry was at all appetizing, no, as it was a far cry from a hot and juicy morsel of live flesh. Even so, the morbid mare felt her own hunger growing and growing well beyond her barely maintained control. It prowled in the pit of her stomach like a wild animal and shook the cage of candy flesh that contained it so hard that she was visibly vibrating with each ravenous growl.

By now the muddy slush was up to her chest and it took everything she had not to bury her mouth in the putrid slurry and inhale as much as she could swallow.

“Feeling peckish?” was Lemon Drop's arch response to her obviously unstable condition.

For all she hated him in that moment, it was perhaps this comment that saved her. Lemon Drop studied the undead mare like she was a particularly uninteresting bug crawling in the dirt. That hint of a smirk curling his lip as he watched her struggle was absolutely infuriating. Was watching her wade through this foul sewage all it took to crack that false veneer of affected rationalism to reveal the true smug sense of superiority that lurked within him?

As the Candy Mare's eyes chased the phantom of emotion across the cold-blooded child-killers face, she couldn’t help but notice that the pretentious pony wasn’t even sunk into the mud as she was! His hooves seemed to float just about the swampy surface, untouched by even so much as a single speck of dirt!

She would never give in to this place in front of him.

She could not even fathom the idea of giving him that satisfaction.

There was absolutely no way she was going to give in to her hunger if it meant him seeing her wallow in this sty with these pigs!

Gritting her teeth, the Candy Mare defiantly pressed on, resisting the urge to devour everything in sight... barely...

The rain slowly subsided, and the soft earth returned to a more rocky terrain. It should have been easier going here, but now it was Lemon Drop’s turn to slow their progress. His every step grew heavier and heavier as they stomped across the dusty plain. It wasn’t long before the Candy Mare noticed that there were ribbons of shadow trailing behind the unicorn. These shadows coalesced into clanking chains, wrapped tight around Lemon Drop's chest. They trailed down his limbs as well, leading to several boulder sized safes and money boxes that drug great furrows in the dirt behind him. So heavy was this weight on the pony that he was forced to hunker down and crawl through the dust just to move a few inches at a time.

It was laughable how he struggled to maintain an air of dignity while he sweated and strained, and the Candy Mare didn't need much encouragement to laugh at his suffering. Seeing that their roles were now reversed, with Lemon Drop struggling to resist the magical burdens of Hell, the Candy Mare couldn’t help but mock his misfortune.

“Not so high and mighty now, are you?” cackled the ghoulish mare, setting one of her candy hooves on the top of Lemon Drop’s head, ruffling his carefully coiffed mane. He jerked away and gave her an icy look that failed to hide the flash of anger in his eyes. “Aww, what’s the matter? Don’t like being looked down on? I guess it’s hard to maintain that sense of self-satisfied superiority when you go from being an impassive observer to writhing in the dirt like everyone else!"

Free of any such impediment herself, the Candy Mare could see other shades in a similar predicament to Lemon Drop. Some tried to drag their weight behind them while others stubbornly tried to push their burdens before them. What was bizarre was that occasionally two of the shades might meet and squabble among themselves, greedily protective of their burdens, as if the things that drug them down were somehow valuable. Of course all this useless flailing led to was each sinner getting more and more tangled, tightening the chains that bound them about their bodies until they were practically strangling themselves. They were usually left much worse off after such an encounter.

"Maybe I should just leave you here with the rest of the trash?" The Candy Mare mused. Rather than act on the idea, she merely went back to giggling and climbed atop the largest of the iron lockboxes that trailed behind Lemon Drop, adding her own weight to his already prodigious burdens. "I'm sure your so called 'master' would be thrilled if I showed up without you."

If the candified mare was attempting to break Lemon Drop’s spirit, then her jeers had the opposite effect. Despite the additional weight, the unicorn didn’t say a word as he rallied, rising back up from the earth and hauling himself faster across the land. He still was not able to approach much more than walking pace and his chains dug deep into his legs and chest, biting into his flesh so hard he left a trail of bloody droplets in the sand. Still, he persevered. For her part, the Candy Mare simply laughed at his determination and continued to ride behind him, holding the other end of his chains like reins which she occasionally shook as if she were driving him, or would occasional jerk this way or that in an attempt to make him stumble and fall. Even when he did fall, however, the cold blooded killer would simply rise to his hooves and continue trudging on.

At last they came to the edges of an impassable marsh. The first the Candy Mare knew of this, of course, was when her perch suddenly vanished from beneath her. A new part of the realm came with new rules, and Lemon Drop was free to roam once more, unimpeded.

The candified corpse fell heavily to the gravely shore, anger swelling up inside her. Of course she turned her venomous glare Lemon Drop's way, blaming him for this sudden turn of events, but instead of seeing his sardonic smile she discovered he wasn't paying any attention to her at all. The unicorn's back was to her as he seemed to be preoccupied with contemplating the vast wetland that stretched before them.

Forcing herself to stifle her rage, the Candy Mare came to stand beside him. What she had first taken to be a body of water turned out to be something far stranger. The 'marsh' was made up of an endless flowing battle. Shades warred with one another, some with weapons and others without, flowing back and forth like a great tide of violence and wrath. Beneath the surging fighters on top, the defeated could be seen muttering and groaning, biding their time before vindictively rejoining the battle and forcing some other poor soul beneath the tide of limbs.

“What are they all fighting over?” asked the Candy Mare, baffled by the endless tumult.

“Nothing. Or perhaps, everything” replied Lemon Drop enigmatically. “These were those in life who were driven by anger. The amusing part is that most of them were not even necessarily violent, or even aggressive. Many of them were merely sullen wretches who spent their time blaming their woes on everyone around them but themselves. Sound familiar?”

The sugar-coated mare knew better than to rise to his bait. “So what now? Is the tour over?”

“Not quite...” assured the former candy maker, his eyes scanning the horizon. “We have a bit further to go, however we won’t be able to pass beyond here on our own. Ah! It appears our chauffeur has arrived.”

At first the Candy Mare had no idea what Lemon Drop was talking about. Then she spotted an odd shaped boat bobbing along the surface of the warring sinners. It seemed to be forged of bronze, with long pointed spikes jutting into the air from six points around its circumference. There were no sails or oars, so it was hard to see how the raft propelled itself. It was impossible to hear the sound of an engine over the roar of the warring spirits, so perhaps there was some mechanism like that which drove it so smoothly and steadily through the clash of the damned?

However, as the vessel grew nearer it became apparent that there was no conventional means of propulsion driving it at all.

It wasn’t even a boat.

It appeared to, in fact, be an enormous brazen crown!

As it came in closer to the shore, the craft slowly rose on a pillar of flame and molten rock. As the clinging souls of sinners fell away the rising wall of stone resolved itself into the angriest face that the Candy Mare had ever seen. It seemed to be carved from molten rock, veins of magma pulsed through the ferocious visage. A pair of eyes that burned with malice sat beneath a brow of flame, wreathed in a great beard that blazed like a forest fire, the tightening of its otherwise frozen grimace was the only sign that the towering colossus had noticed the pair of ponies at all. As its shoulders, chest, and arms rose from the tide, it appeared the cracks of lava extended down the giants stony body as well. In due course the titan waded ashore, more and more of his frame rising into view. It was not long before they were completely lost in the shadow of the towering colossus.

“I’ve seen bigger.” quipped the Candy Mare.

“Don’t be rude to the help, dear” chided Lemon Drop. “Phlegyas duty is to act as ferryman across the Styx. Don't tempt him into abandoning us part-way in our crossing, unless you fancy trying to swim back to shore on your own.”

The giant extended a massive hand that was as wide as a football field and nearly as long when you took his long claws into account. Despite having what looked like skin made of hot volcanic rock, Lemon Drop clambered aboard without complaint. There was a soft hiss as the Candy Mare followed suit, but the heat was not enough to melt her sugar coated body. As soon as both ponies were aboard the hand slowly rose into the air, placing both high atop the perch that was the bronze crown that set on Phlegyas's titanic head. With his passengers secured, the behemoth spoke not a word but instead turned and started back the way he had come.

As the molten giant slid down, down beneath the waves of battle, there was a brief moment it seemed that the crown they rode on might sink as well, or perhaps be capsized by the angry shades that raged all around. The tall spikes of the crown plowed steadily through the crowd, however, and forced the warring spirits down to either side. They wailed in pain and despair as the hot metal made contact with them, pushing them aside and forcing them underneath the waves that formed in the crown's wake.

Nothing new or notable happened for awhile after this, and with the crown gliding far more smoothly through the crowd than a real boat would have traveled on the open water, it wasn’t long before things actually seemed peaceful.

Or at least as peaceful as one could hope for in Hell.