We Are All Just Prisoners Here...
The dismissal still burned in her ears, even now, several hours later, the words taking on a life of their own, taunting her with every syllable in that icy, regal tone. The way it spelled out both judgment and doom, sealed her fate as if she were some importunate diamond dog, not even worthy to be in the sight of the Solar Princess. It had eaten away at her while she’d sulked in her room for the last time, dredging up every ugly, unpony-like emotion she’d ever experienced, until Sunset couldn’t take it anymore. She had to do something, to act, before everything she was feeling tore her apart from the inside out.
She stared defiantly at the mirror that had started it all, the surface coiling in an eerie manner, as if it were not glass, but some unknown liquid that defied all the laws of reality. Strange and potent magic oozed from its depths, as if the mirror had a heartbeat or breath of its own—an impossibility, Sunset knew, but it was a perception that was hard to shake, standing this close to it in the darkened storeroom where it had been moved after one too many times of her bringing it up in conversation. For her own good, of course. Her hide had been rippling with a shiver of unease, but that errant, furious thought pushed down the feeling in favor of the much more welcome and familiar rage that smoldered like an ember in her chest. She watched her reflection’s muzzle twist into a glare, face half cast in shadows by the solitary sphere of light that bobbed next to her obediently and pushed back the blackness that could only be found deep underground, in a place where the Sun never shed its Light.
“I’ll show her,” she hissed, imbuing the word with all the sneering sarcasm she could, with all the years of impossible standards, with the disappointment and frustration and anger when she always seemed to fall just short of what she wanted, what she deserved. Sunset’s fury burned hotter, igniting the ember into a barely controlled inferno, her magic pulsing dangerously in response. She would show the alicorn just what kind of mistake she'd made this night...and all those nights and days before it. The Princess of the Sun only thought she knew what regret was—by the time Sunset was through with her, she would know that emotion in ways that the mare had never imagined in her worst nightmares and darkest days.
Hate and hurt made her throat tight and her breath sound strained to her own ears, which flattened back when she saw tears sparkling in her reflection’s eyes, felt them welling up and threatening to spill over. That fueled the inferno in her, filling her with stubborn determination—she refused to shed a single tear over any of it. Sunset Shimmer was a stronger pony than that, stronger than all of them, and she would not be found weeping over being cast aside like some weak little filly.
“I can do this. I will do this.”
The amber colored unicorn gritted her teeth and lunged forward before she could have any second thoughts, going from standing still to a full gallop in half a stride, her hooves making sharp ringing sounds on the polished palace floor. The mirror loomed before her on its sturdy pedestal, the dark liquid of its surface filled with strange, unnatural shadows and flickering images that danced out of existence before she could get a real look at them. It made her stomach churn, trying too hard to follow them, so at the last moment, she closed her eyes, gathering her haunches under her and leaping at the mirror like a fiery meteor.
She half expected to impact the glass, to have it shatter and slice her open with its shards. Instead she pushed through a viscous feeling membrane that was so cold it burned, and her entire reality was turned on its head. Colors she had no names for met her gaze and sensations she lacked the ability to process crashed into her with all the force of a charging minotaur bull. It overloaded her senses, striking her blind and deaf and dumb, left with only her internal awareness of herself to let her know she even still existed as a corporeal form, rather than a ghost in an infinite void. What was left to her was sunfire and glacial ice, the pressure of a landslide on her chest and squeezing the air from her lungs even as her innards pushed back like a star gone supernova…like some overeager god-foal was grasping at everything she was, twisting and pulling, folding, stretching, pressing her as though she were naught more than modeling clay. Everything in her mind told her that this should be utter agony, but all she registered was a detached itch in her bones and something draining out of her like water from a glass…
How long she was in the space between worlds, she couldn't say. Time had no meaning while she was rendered insensate. It could have been an instant or an eternity and she wouldn't have been able to tell the difference as she was, held captive inside her own head.
Then she was free of that place, and she could feel her skin again, sense the way she was falling in an arc through the air at considerable speed, the air thick with chilly moisture that she had encountered before when passing through cloud cover on trips to other cities. True fear lanced through Sunset—what if the other side of the portal had opened only to emptiness, leaving her to plunge to her death?
She had barely completed the thought when she impacted cold, damp stone. Her hooves jerked in instinctive response, but there wasn't enough time and she was still so disoriented that she couldn't get them under her properly. They crumpled uselessly under her barrel, but it was enough that her head only thumped lightly against what seemed like the ground, leaving her somewhat stunned but uninjured.
Unable to do anything else, Sunset lay there, her cheek pressed to a coarse, rough, flat stone, feeling the cold seeping into her. Everything felt different, wrong somehow in ways she couldn't quite put into words, making the unicorn wonder if the portal had somehow damaged her. Her head was muzzy, disoriented, making it a task to take stock of her senses as they returned to her.
Taking in what her nerve endings were telling her only made her confusion worse, her hide prickling in response in a way that felt...unnatural. She could feel the temperature, the moisture in the strange stone beneath her, as it bled through some kind of rough, heavy fabric enshrouding her legs and belly, but her forelimbs had been spared, touching something silky and soft. She could feel the weight of her heavy saddlebags listing to one side on her back, feel the grit of sand or dirt on the stone under her face, making even the slightest movement sting.
The physical discomfort took her mind off the growing pressure on her eardrums for a little while, until it became nearly painful. Sunset flinched, trying to flick her ears in case there was water or debris in them, but the muscles were numb and unresponsive. The relief when her ears finally popped and sound returned nearly brought her to tears, even if all she could hear at first was white noise—not only was it an end to the pressure and pain, but the concern that she might have been made permanently deaf and blind had been a very real worry. The white noise slowly resolved itself into a nonsensical cacophony that drilled into her skull: a terrible, great, rushing sound like a waterfall in the distance, accompanied by the wailing screams of an unknown, monstrous nature, and a faint undercurrent of an unending buzzing, like a droning mass of endless insects whose voices blurred together into a single whole, all muffled and echoing bizarrely, as if her head was under a pillow.
For a time, Sunset lay there, just breathing, trying to adjust to the bombardment on her ears, unable to turn them away from the sounds. It was in the middle of a ragged, panted breath that she almost choked, suddenly able to not only smell the air but taste it, and it was vile. She had expected the cold, mineral odor of stone, maybe the smell of damp foliage or even the odor of decaying vegetation, but nothing in her life had prepared her for the bitter, foul reek that flooded her airways and coated her tongue. They were odors she couldn’t completely identify, that didn't match anything in her mental catalogue of scents. Most prominent was the thick, choking, sulfurous stench of an alchemical disaster and the cloying yet acrid smell of something burning, but under those were other odors....the sharp metallic tang that reminded Sunset of blood, the sickly sweet smell of decay, the odor of ozone that comes after a storm, and a wet earth and floral vegetation scent that conflicted nauseatingly with all the other smells assaulting her, filling her mouth and nose. Her stomach twisted and lurched as the unicorn gagged and spit, determined to hold the contents of her stomach in place by sheer force of will if necessary.
It was a battle Sunset Shimmer only half won, leaving a rancid puddle of mucus and bile scant inches from her face. Foul as it was, it cleared her airways marginally, allowing her to breathe without more retching as the world around her went from a black void to something dark and gray and fuzzy around the edges.
The burning anger that had her so knotted up before was pushed aside by a rising dread. She hadn't even recovered from her trip through the portal yet, and the world she was in already felt like a nightmare. Blue-green orbs blinked rapidly, trying to restore her sight faster. Sunset needed to know what kind of place she was in, and to do that, she needed her sight.
Colors returned first as indistinct, washed out smudges, but the dark gray blurs only got marginally lighter. As her eyes remembered how to focus properly, Sunset realized it was both nighttime still, and extremely foggy—the kind of thick, clinging fog that curled around hooves and hung over a pony’s coat, feeling for all the world like a heavy, moist blanket that did nothing to help with the autumn chill that was leeching heat from her body. She was on a stone path that crossed a neatly manicured lawn, with mage lights mounted on metal poles creating fuzzy orbs of illumination. Rising before her, like some titanic beast, the light reflecting off its windows as moonlight off a multitude of eyes, was a huge brick building. It was so large that she could not see the edges of it before it disappeared into the swirling mists and darkness. For the moment, she seemed to be utterly alone, but the presence of the building—which was in good condition—suggested that there were local inhabitants of the thinking variety. Sunset wasn’t sure if that was a good thing yet.
Still feeling somewhat ill and shaky, the unicorn gathered her hooves under her as best she could, fumbling to do so around some kind of inky black garment that hadn’t been there when she leapt at the magic mirror. Despite its unexplained experience, she was grateful for its warmth and even the soothing, pleasant smell that radiated off it when she sniffed at it. Distracted by the rich scent, and supple texture of the outside that helped her identify it as some kind of expertly worked and enchanted leather, it took her several moments to realize that the input from the rest of her body still felt wrong, with her hips and haunches were bent and twisted out of their normal shape, putting them higher than her head, and her front hooves were sending her messages of discomfort and pain that made no sense. The pain made her sit down on her rump hard, focusing on what was wrong with her front legs, why they were not responding right, why standing on them hurt, why the elbows and shoulders felt distinctly different...
Sunset’s eyes grew wide when she raised those limbs up and gravity tugged the sleeves of the black coat downward, revealing deformed paws instead of proper hooves...hairless, pentadactyl paws with short stubby digits and small, thin, useless claws, a sight more at home on a yeti or a minotaur than on a pony. They bulged out at what should have been a proper knee joint, creating a wide, flat surface instead of tapering into smooth cannon bone of her lower leg. “...what’s happened to me?” she half whimpered, shivering, as she watched strange shadows playing over the thin, weak digits and soft skinned paw-pad.
The only answer she received was the eerie, unnatural way her voice echoed in the heavy air, far too high in pitch to be normal. She hadn’t sounded like that since before she’d earned her cutie mark, and it soured in her stomach—she hated sounding like a weak, terrified little filly. Sunset Shimmer was no cowering, whining, cringing foal—she was the top student at CSGU, the prodigy who broke records and was so far ahead of all of her peers that they could never hope to catch up. She had a grand destiny, one that would see her as an alicorn, whether or not the Solar Princess approved. She would not be beaten by messed up magic from an ancient mirror!
Sunset shook her mane out, the toss of her head meant to get the hair from her eyes where it liked to fall so she could see better...and realized even that felt weird and wrong in how it settled around her neck and face. Scowling, she ran the conjuration spell through her mind to summon a mirror, focusing magic into her horn...
Pain ripped through her skull, settling with a painful throb in her temples, with her inner magic giving only the barest flutter in response to her efforts. Sunset swore viciously, tears coming to her eyes at the sudden burst of agony. What had her trip through the portal done to her horn? Had it been cracked or damaged somehow? Or worse, broken? That was a horrifying thought—a unicorn with a broken horn, its core snapped off, was barely a unicorn at all, unable to properly channel their magic with any kind of skill. That would be a fate worse than death in her eyes, with her very essence so utterly tied to her magic. Without conscious thought, her mangled not-hooves rose to fumble at her face, as stiff and awkward and uncoordinated as a foal’s first steps—she almost poked herself in the eye in the process. What they found was not the banged up muzzle and damaged horn like she’d feared, but something far worse, something that made her stomach drop out from under her and the blood roar painfully in her ears while black spots danced at the edges of her vision.
A flat, furless face with wide lips and a tiny pug nose...and smooth, unbroken skin just below her forelock where her horn should have been.
Fear and horror gripped her throat like a vice, refusing to let air into lungs that were begging for air. She clawed frantically at her face, desperate for this to be a nightmare, only to recoil at the pain of the short claws scratching thin, furless skin. Sunset wanted to scream, but her core was as icy as the wind that gusted abruptly, and her frozen lungs refused to obey any kind of conscious direction. Terror like she’d rarely known overwhelmed her, ancient instincts triggering pure panic and the need to run, to gallop away as fast as hooves could take her. Somehow, she managed to get to all fours, bolting back the way she had come, towards the sense of Equestria and its magic, two things synonymous with safety, especially compared to this dead, lifeless, twisted world that reeked of wrongness. But the warped limbs she had now didn’t work the way instinct wanted them to, and pain flared in abused paws right before she tripped over herself and hit the stone again with a muffled thud. The momentum she’d managed to achieve sent her body rolling and skidding across the cold ground before her progress was halted by even colder and wetter stone. The impact sent agony across her back and shoulders, and forced all the breath from her in a painful rush. The air was filled with the wheezing sound of her trying to get her lungs to work right again.
How long she lay there, she didn’t know, shaking violently from more than the cold and wet. By this point, everything hurt, the mutated form and its joints protesting the abuse from her trying to make them work the way she thought they should, her head throbbing from her attempt to use her magic, and her senses overloaded by the wrongness of everything. It took time for her to collect her wits, to push back the sheer, mind numbing terror that paralyzed her with willpower and stubbornness. Sunset sat up again, slowly, in control of herself once more and determined to make the best of this, somehow. She had to—after everything that had happened, after the fight, and the hateful words and the way she had callously tossed her aside, Sunset would find what she needed to prove the Princess of the Sun wrong. She’d come too far to give in now, to be beaten by a portal botched transfiguration and a missing horn. Sunset Shimmer would have the title, the Ascension she so rightly deserved…She would be a Princess.
A shadowy something moved before her eyes, a figure reflected in the polished white marble that stood as a base to a statue and the fixed point for the portal’s aperture on this side of the magical conduit. Blue-green eyes narrowed, fixing on it and realizing it was not a stranger. This was a shadow she’d seen once before, in the self same mirror that had deposited her here. She had seen it for only a brief second, the day her teacher had first shown her the mirror, as the monarch had pulled her away from its polished surface, radiating disappointment and disapproval, and Sunset had not been able to identify what it was. Rather than disappearing quickly, the strange shadow stayed, giving her more than a faint, unnatural and eerie glimpse. Practically hairless but for a wild, frazzled mane not unlike what would be seen on a lion, it had a flat face, rounded cheeks, a high, smooth forehead, and wide, staring eyes. Narrow shoulders and a thin torso held up a head that almost seemed too large, giving it a distorted, impossible appearance, like someone had taken a real animal and viewed it through a fun-house mirror. It was horrifying to behold, and when her mangled yeti-paw rested on the stone, she realized the deformed monster staring back at her was not another being at all....it was her reflection...
Any remaining fury guttered out, and her courage deserted her between one heartbeat and the next. It didn’t matter any more. Deformed, twisted limbs be damned to Tartarus—Sunset was going to crawl back through that portal if she had to, hoping that this transformation would be undone by the return trip. She’d find another method to get what she wanted, anything that didn’t involve being trapped in the body of a warped, mutant creature who couldn’t use magic!
Managing to get her body moving, scrambling and pulling herself with those hideous paws as best she could, Sunset hurled herself towards the magic she could barely sense...
And bounced off the unforgiving stone with a sickening crunch and explosion of pain, the hideous pug nose streaming blood and snot, making tears well up in her eyes.
The portal…was closed. She was stuck.
And Sunset Shimmer, in a body not her own, shivering and exposed and bereft of her magic, broke. Her paws curled into balls and she pounded those against the marble, gasping and choking on the nauseating, coppery blood that kept getting into her mouth, sobbing openly now.
“Please! Please let me go home! Princess Celestia! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean any of it, just let me come home please! I don’t want it anymore, any of it—just let me through! I can't—” She gagged, retched, painting the stone with blood and bile, crumpling in on herself in despair. “You can’t leave me here like this, Princess, please...oh by the stars, please!”
Primal terror and frenzied rage blurred together and turned her into a gibbering, mad thing, begging any force she could think of that had the power to intercede, to just let her through the portal, in between wailing for the mare who was her mentor, her mother, her everything. “Princess...mom...please! I swear I didn’t mean it...I’m sorry...’m so sorry...” In her reflection, in her mind’s eye, maybe even through the portal to the other side, she wasn’t sure anymore, she saw Princess Celestia staring down at her, expression cold and pitiless, offering no respite, no solace, only condemnation and disappointment, and in the haze of pain and fear and fury, Sunset couldn’t be sure if it was real or only another nightmare brought to life by an overwrought psyche.
It renewed her frantic screaming and crying, pushing her to keep beating on the stone with deformed paws that burned with agony until they went numb from being slammed into hard stone with all her might, weeping for someone to help her, to save her from this waking nightmare...
And the fog swallowed it all, leaving only that unnatural silence and a soul-deep chill…and no mercy for the lost unicorn who had damned herself.
Author's Note
As noted in the description, this little gem started out as a 1000 word one-shot for a prompt. It...became more than that, after the initial 1000 words. I've long since had Sunset's initial arrival through the portal in my head for Cross the Rubicon, as well as her years in the human world before the movie. Maybe someday, this'll get expanded as the prologue of that experience. Who knows. For now though, its a stand alone piece.
Gotta finish Rubicon before that though. And now I've got chapters to write, lol. So much to doooo. Hope everyone enjoyed.
