Letters to the Princess

The drumming of hooves behind her. Shouts. “Cozy, wait!”

Cozy spread her wings and snapped them down, exploding up from the earth in a burst of feathers and violence. Empty. Let them enjoy her empty seat instead. Let them have exactly what they wanted: her, gone.

“Cozy!”

Wide wings beating hard in pursuit. Fury that buzzed in her ears like wasps. Princesses, princesses, princesses. A plague of princesses, battering at the edges of her life since the day Rarity saved her. What a mistake it had been to let one in. To care.

With a furious twist of her wings, straining the muscles, Cozy tried to imagine Flurry Heart as a pegasus. The same girl without any of the baggage. It hurt almost as much as Princess Cadence’s hysteria — which is to say, it didn’t hurt at all. Cozy, after all, was empty. She didn’t feel a single thing.

“Cozy, please stop,” panted Flurry Heart. “I know it was awful, but we need to — whew — talk. We can’t run away from this.”

“Can’t we?” muttered Cozy, curving in the air like an arrow and scanning the crystal city below. There had to be something down there to offer an escape. A distraction. She’d never felt further from Doctor Healing Word and his advice. Never felt less like Rarity’s daughter, and more like the monster ponies said she was.

Flurry’s hoof reached for her. Came within touching distance of the tip of Cozy’s tail. “Cozy, my mother is crazy! You can’t listen to her. Feelings aren’t everything, but she forgets that being an empath doesn’t mean she’s a telepath.”

Halting as abruptly as she’d fled, Cozy whirled on Flurry quickly enough that she flinched. “Say that again.”

For a second they hovered there, matching wingbeat for wingbeat.

“My mother is crazy,” Flurry repeated slowly.

“But you believed her,” Cozy countered, calm and cold. “You didn’t say she’s wrong. Just that she’s crazy. You believe that I’m empty.”

“No I don’t!” flared Flurry. “This isn’t court, Cozy. Stop looking for loopholes. Let’s just…calm down. Let’s go for a fly in the snow.”

“No,” said Cozy, looking into her marefriend’s pretty blue eyes and knowing, deep in her soul, that she was lying. Empty. Empty. Empty. Everything she and Flurry had ever built together shivered on its foundations. Cracked. Crumbled. Flurry had seen inside her, and had decided what it meant. There was no going back. “No, I don’t think I will.”

After that everything faded away.

“Stop it, Cozy,” Flurry panted.

Cozy looked down at the stallion she held pinned beneath her hoof. This, this right here, was the point of no return. She had not hurt a living being in decades. She had not even wanted to. The dreams where she did left her frozen and furious with an icy anger.

But this, right here, was what it came down to. No one believed in her. Not even Flurry. Perhaps not even Rarity, for all her love and fine words.

If no one would ever believe her, what was Cozy fighting for? What was left?

With a cruel, detached precision that had never left her, Cozy snapped the guard’s tibia. Somepony screamed. Maybe it was Flurry. Maybe it was Cozy.

One little threat in a bar and the Princess of the Crystal Empire will hear about it. One little threat — get out of my way — and the guards arrive. And not even her daughter can hold them back.

“Stop it, stop it,” Flurry was sobbing, held back by another four guards who shout things about her mother’s orders and her safety — as though Cozy would ever hurt Flurry. But Cozy knew how strong alicorns were. Four measly little stallions could not hold an alicorn back, unless she was afraid of hurting them. Unless she cared more about them than the mare she claimed to love. “Cozy, don’t hurt Crumpet. He’s a good pony. You don’t want to hurt him.”

Don’t hurt Crumpet? Cozy looked down at the stallion again, his face distorted with pain. The world is full of Crumpets. Lazy, stupid little potato ponies. Don’t hurt Crumpet. What if Crumpet hurt me?

The words wouldn’t come out. They stuck in her throat, thick and horrible. All she could manage was a strangled, wordless growl.

She needed to go. She knew that. She needed her doctor, and her mother, and to be away from this hellscape. But it was all snowballing too quickly, and she couldn’t…she couldn’t do it anymore.

She looked at Crumpet, and Flurry finally shook off the guards restraining her. “Stop it,” she whispered, and Cozy knew with bone-deep certainty she was finally seeing the monster beneath the mask. Finally acknowledging the truth.

There was no Cozy Glow. There was only empty.

The Princess took a step forward.

Cozy opened her jaws, bared her teeth — lowered her face until it was directly over the guard’s jugular. “Stop right there."

Flurry froze.

Cozy smiled. Ponies always got so predictable when you threatened violence. There was something remarkably reassuring about it. Something safe.

“This is...hmm, let's see...this is Crumpet, right? Thick little buttery Crumpet. And all I have to end Crumpet's meaningless little life is apply three pounds of pressure right here and bite. Even pegasus teeth have enough strength to do that.”

Flurry shook her head. “Cozy, you wouldn’t.”

“Wouldn't I?” Cozy smiled, and it was the smile of a shark, all teeth and gleaming white. “It strikes me, Princess, that you don't know what the tartarus you're talking about.”

There was something dark in Flurry’s eyes, something twisted and frightened. And then the Princess of the Crystal Empire was gone again, a coward like all Princesses, running away, and Cozy Glow was alone with poor little Crumpet again. The ragged sound of his breathing the only way to mark the passing of time.

“Do you think she’ll come back?” she whispered into his ear. “I miss her, Crumpet, don’t you?”

He let out a pained hiss of air, and Cozy Glow watched the door as he watched her. Both of them frightened. Both of them unsure.

“I hope she comes back, Crumpet,” Cozy breathed, and the joy was gone from her voice. “I hope she comes back.”

Hours passed, and the bar emptied. One by one, ponies backed out of the room, whispering urgently to each other. Cozy Glow, indulgent to the last, let them leave. Let them live. She was okay with her and Crumpet. They were getting to be friends now. Cozy liked him better when he slept, pale and uneasy, breath hitching with pain every time the broken bone hurt him.

She was waiting. Through the haze of unreality, she was sure of just one thing: Flurry would come back.

But it was not Flurry that next showed herself in that pathetic little pub. It was another face: paler, scored deep with lines and framed by hair turned grey too soon.

Cozy Glow, still scrambling to her hooves from where she sprawled beside Crumpet, turned ashen when she saw who was walking through the door.

“Mama.”

Rarity took in the scene before her, the mess, the blood, and her eyes filled with tears.

“Cozy…”

A muscle in Cozy Glow’s jaw spasmed, and she fought to control it. “Go away, Mama.” I don’t want you to see me like this.

"You've not had a lapse like this in fifteen years, darling. Please, you must stop this."

Rage bubbled, so hot and so easy, and Cozy stamped down on the pegasus' wing. It broke again: a dry crackle, like a twig. Always so easy to snap, pegasus bones.

Rarity flinched.

"It could easily have been his neck," Cozy said calmly, offering her mother a sweet smile, the same smile she used to use when bringing her a cup of tea. Waiting for her to turn away, like they all did. To leave her. To run.

A deep breath. A slightly watery smile. “Then thank you for being restrained, Cozy.”

“Thank you?” Laughter. Strangely echoey. Why did everything feel so unreal? “You're thanking me for this?”

“You're very upset. You've had...you're hurt. I understand how that feels.”

Cozy looked at the bloodied and bleeding ponies around her. “You understand me?” The yawning, carvernous hollowness within her. The great void that craved for something to fill it, anything to make her feel. To hurt and wound other ponies until they felt as empty as she did. “You understand this?”

She took a step forward, and despite herself, despite the love in her eyes, Rarity cringed back.

Another laugh, but this one sounded more like a sob. “That's what I thought.”

“You're my daughter, and I will always love you. Always.”

There was a pause, and then Rarity began that slow, cautious progress towards her again. One careful hoofstep at a time.

“I’ve had my heart broken too, Cozy.”

Cozy scoffed. “That's what you think this is?”

“I heard about the dinner.”

“You don't know anything about what happened. You don't know anything about me.”

“I know how it feels to be rejected.”

“You're always holding me back. Chains of guilt and chains of love." Scorn dripped from the word.

"Whatever that is."

“You're a good pony, Cozy.”

Cozy Glow’s voice rang out like a whipcrack. “I am NOT. And I am sick of you treating me like I am. I am sick of your expectations.”

She raised her hoof and looked into her mother's blue eyes. Everything was broken. Fifteen years of careful structure, never setting a hoof wrong. All broken down in an afternoon by emotion, by princesses, by love. She saw the pain in her mother’s face, the sorrow. The hope. It was a cage. Flurry Heart was a prison, and Rarity was a cage. The bars were soft ones, that bent just enough to feel like they were not truly imprisoning her — but they were bars nevertheless. And Rarity had done it deliberately. She had taken a wild thing, and she had fashioned herself into the only thing that could contain it.

And Cozy could break out. She could. It would be easy. All she needed to do was stamp down, at just the right place on the vertebrae, and end a life. She had not killed anyone in fifteen years. Not since she was twelve. And to do so now would...it would be a point of no return. It would end things. End this charade of family and redemption. Rarity would never forgive her.

Cozy would finally be free.

Flurry Heart was already lost. She would never return to Cozy after this spectacle, the unveiling of the beast inside. What was the point of staying, when Flurry was gone?

She looked again at the older mare and saw the sorrow on her face. The lines etched deep into her face. The grey streaks cutting deep swathes into that proud purple mane. A life of care and worry for a child not even her own. When...when had Rarity gotten so old? Cozy's red eyes, the same shade as the blood that flecked her pale coat, met her mother's deep blue eyes, and a breath shuddered out between flaring nostrils.

Her raised hoof thudded to the floor.

It was over.

She could not do it to Rarity.

Hope flared in the older mare's eyes, and Cozy Glow offered a weak smile."I'm done, Mama."

A sob of relief burst from Rarity's throat and she rushed forward, stumbling over injured and unconscious ponies to reach her daughter.