Whack! Luna's fine, Princessly hooves impacted the side of the dead horse's head with such thunderous force that if invisible observers had been roaming Equestria, thousands of them surely would have taken notice of the flat, dull sound. The dead horse that Luna was beating was definitively dead, and had no way of taking notice. Its head skidded slightly along the ground from the hit. Did Luna know that the horse was dead from the beginning of her efforts, or did she believe initially that a beating would have had some effect on the horse? To a sensible observer, it was absolutely plain that the horse that Luna was beating was completely dead, but whether Luna believed otherwise was hard to say.
Whok! The corpse being subjected to the savage beating was young; its life had been short, but once this poor horse had been full of life and potential. Of course, it was now clear that its time in this world had run out some time ago. It appeared to have had a Cutie Mark at one point, and one could only imagine the beautiful life it had led. Now all that was left of the poor horse was an abused and time-ravaged shell, drained of energy. Other ponies often stopped to watch Luna as she kicked the dead horse, and Luna's heart soared when she saw the pleasure in their vacant eyes. A few, whose faces carried a different spark of intelligence, shook their heads in annoyance, but they were always drowned out by the happily cheering herd.
Bam! The more Luna laid down her assault, the more the horse's obliterated cutie mark seemed to come into focus. At one point, it looked like an oreo. The next moment, it looked like a showerhead. As the dead horse's cutie mark morphed into the shape of a doorknob, Luna's bucking only increased in intensity. It seemed she would never tire of beating this dead horse.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, Luna let her rear hooves rest on the ground. The many hoofmarks she'd left on the dead horse's head and side were only a few among hundreds; it seemed that many ponies before her had inexplicably decided that this dead horse needed beating.
After a short rest, however, Luna decided that she wasn't ready to move on from attacking the dead horse. As she started her mechanical pounding again, she realized that she was running out of different ways to beat the horse. She reared and brought her forehooves down hard on the horse's neck, and even grabbed it by the mane and dragged it in a circle for a few minutes. The sounds she made were inconsistent; she often faltered as if she'd made a mistake and was a bumbling amateur at dead horse bucking.
Luna realized that her thoughts had turned from the dead horse to being actually about her campaign against the dead horse itself. She was thinking self-referential thoughts about the action itself of pounding the dead horse. It was rather silly, actually, seeing herself twist and flail in trying to violate the dead horse in more and more advanced ways. Some time ago, she'd tried to forbid herself from such thoughts, but at least these thoughts were amusing to her. Very amusing, in fact--a smile came to her face. Thinking about herself and her beating of the dead horse was refreshing, and she enjoyed proving to herself that she was intelligent enough for such things. Suddenly, she shook her head. Such forbidden thoughts ought not distract her from the dead horse.
Back to beating the dead horse. Luna grit her teeth as she blasted the deceased equine harder and harder, resorting to biting and headbutts to try to expand her vocabulary of dead horse beatings. As the sun started to set, Luna’s beatings continued. Sometimes she talked softly to herself of sensuous things. Luna sometimes referred to herself in third person, but during her sensual imaginings, she called herself “you.” Imagining that the dead horse was a lover made her happy, though it would have been clear to an outside observer that the horse could offer none of the unpredictable, tumultuous energy that would have made for a truly satisfying relationship. When she had these thoughts, the horse’s cutie mark vaguely resembled a pair of tinted goggles, the sort that might be worn by a white-furred, blue-maned unicorn audiophile.
When the dead horse’s flank-mark resembled a gas mask over a mushroom-shaped explosions, Luna almost forgot that she was a pony. She had hooves, of course, and a horn, and wings, but her thoughts were far from anything that might have been found in the land of Equestria. The dead horse was still there, of course, but Luna treated it nothing like a horse or a pony: She glared at it, her mood turned grim and dark, and she hammered with mindless glee. It was as if her rage at the dead horse was no longer her own; she was merely an accessory, a side-thing borrowing another, far mightier pony’s puissance. Her own blows were tiny compared to the humungous power of the pony she was trying to imitate at these times, but still her hits were loud enough so that she could attract attention. In a way, Luna was trapped: a slave of her own depraved, unchanging fixation on carcass-thwacking. Worse, the ponies who looked on kept clopping their hooves, encouraging her to fall deeper into the dead horse's thrall.
Still, perhaps there was a simple sort of beauty to Luna's stiff-lamming. Every time her hooves crashed against the coffin-stuffer horse in front of her, a sound was indeed produced, even if it was a boring and slightly annoying sound. One day in the future, it might be possible for Luna to abandon her labor of laying into the departed stallion. Until then, however, Luna would just keep striking, over and over again, producing the same flat, dull, monotonous sound.
